THE INVESTMENT 
OF TRUTH 





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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 



THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

AND OTHER SERMONS 



BY 

FREDERIC E. DEWHURST 

AUTHOR OF "DWELLERS IN TENTS" 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 

ALBION W. SMALL 



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CHICAGO 

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 

1907 



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LIBRARY of C0N6RE32,' 
Two Copies Received 

! JUL 1 S907 \ 






. Copyrrg-ht Entry 
CLASS ffCL XXc, No. 

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Copyright 1907 By 
The University of Chicago 



Published June 1907 



Composed and Printed By 

The University of Chicago Press 

Chicago, Illinois, U. S. A. 






DEDICATED TO 

WINIFRED, HELEN, DOROTHY, 

AND FREDERIC 



; O foung mariner, 
Down to the haven, 
Call your companions, 
Launch your vessel, 
And crowd your canvas, 
And, ere it vanishes 
Over the margin, 
After it, follow it, 
Follow the gleam." 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. The Investment of Truth i 



II. Eating the Shewbread .... 

III. "Think on These Things" . . 

IV. The Spirit within the Wheels . 
V. The City That Hath Foundations 

VI. "The Kingdom of God Is within You" . 87 

VII. Out of the Heart Are the Issues of Life 105 

VIII. The Sacramental Value of Material Things i 23 

IX. The Higher Legalism 137 

X. Work 155 

XI. "Where There Is No Vision the People 

Perish" 173 

XII. Three Marks of Essential Christianity . 189 

XIII. The Compassionate God 207 

XIV. The Hidden God 221 

XV. The Hospitality of Christianity and the 

Modifications Resulting 237 

XVI. Rejoicing in Youth 255 



INTRODUCTION 

Frederic Eli Dewhurst was in the Christian min- 
istry twenty-four years, less because he had a message 
to deliver than because he had a message to discover. 
There was a real sense in which, after his struggles to 
get the message, he had a right as clear as the apostle 
John's to describe the content of his preaching as 
"that which we have heard, which we have seen with 
our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands 
have handled of the Word of Life." There was 
strong resemblance, too, between the types of truth to 
which the earlier and the later apostle testified. 

These sermons should be read, therefore, not as 
exercises in rhetoric, not as samples of literary form, 
not as expositions of a complete theology, but chiefest 
as leaves from the log of a single-hearted explorer. 
There is but slight hyperbole in calling them the 
automatic record of the self-discovery of a soul. At 
the same time, they are a diary of a rediscovery of 
Jesus Christ and of the Father whom he revealed. As 
separate discourses they have relatively little signifi- 
cance. When they are taken as minutes of a consis- 
tent spiritual progress, they constitute a human docu- 
ment of rare value. 

Mr. Dewhurst's philosophy, as it appears at its 
ripest in this volume, was not anthropomorphic nor 
anthropocentric, in senses long since discredited; yet 
it was frankly anthroponormative, if I may be per- 



x INTRODUCTION 

mitted to coin such a term for views of life in which 
the latest readings of psychology and sociology blend. 
His sermons contain more direct evidence of atten- 
tion to the psychologists than to the sociologists; but, 
although he always refers to himself as a learner, it 
is not too much to say that he was evidently entitled 
to rank as a fellow-worker in both divisions of labor 
The sermon which gives the title to this volume is at 
once a proof of his own grasp of the religious signifi- 
cance of the transition from the static to the dynamic 
interpretation of life, and a prophecy of the revitaliz- 
ing of religion which will follow general assimilation 
of that conception. The other cardinal perception, that 
everything has value for our intelligence in propor- 
tion to its visible worth for human personality, had 
the force of an axiom in his thinking. He did not 
state it oftener, because he assumed it always. It 
came to light most distinctly in such sermons as "Eat- 
ing the Shrewbread," "The Spirit within the Wheels," 
"The Sacramental Value of Material Things," and 
"Work." 

Readers of this volume would miss its chief mean- 
ing if they supposed that it was a product of the 
usual editorial selection and correction. It is not ? 
collection of sermons for special occasions. It is not 
a laboriously emendated edition of faulty texts. Mr. 
Dewhurst filed and indexed, by number and title, 
every sermon that he wrote, and as a rule he read in 
the pulpit with little variation what he had written 
In the course of years he recomposed some of the 



INTRODUCTION xi 

earlier sermons, or used parts of them in the structure 
of others. Some of the sermons have been published 
in religious newspapers, and the copy was not returned 
to the file. For these and similar reasons there are 
gaps in the collection. With these exceptions, and 
with allowance also for the more than fifty sermons 
previously published in pamphlet or book form, the 
file, in which the last number is 909, is complete. 
Since 1889 Mr. Dewhurst composed his sermons upon 
the typewriter. Those in the present series are printed 
just as he left them, with here and there such correc- 
tions as occur in the usual proof-reading. The sheets 
contain on the average fewer alterations than would 
ordinarily be necessary if an author had dictated from 
his complete copy to a typist. The sermons chosen for 
this volume were all written in the last two years of 
Mr. Dewhurst's life. There is no conspicuous differ- 
ence in quality between them and the others preached 
during the same period. They are selected rather than 
others because they seem to cover the whole gamut of 
his later message. With the exception of the sermon 
"The Investment of Truth," which was preached April 
22, 1906, the chronological order has here been fol- 
lowed. It may be taken as a fair indication of the 
most satisfying perspective of truth which Mr. Dew- 
hurst achieved. The last seven sermons in the volume 
are the last that he wrote. They begin with "Work," 
his greeting to the church on the first Sunday after his 
vacation in 1906, and the illness that proved fatal 
attacked him after he had completed the sermon 



xii INTRODUCTION 

''Rejoicing in Youth." The day on which he had 
expected to preach it at Princeton University proved 
to be next to the last Sunday of his life. 

Scarcely a trace of the hortatory element of preach- 
ing will be found in this volume. In this respect, too, 
it is fairly indicative of the means which Mr. Dew- 
hurst chose to use or to leave unused. The fact, in 
one phase or another, was made a reproach against 
him throughout his ministerial life. But while some 
men could not be themselves without exhorting, he 
would on most occasions have been as unreal in exhor- 
tation as in the role of Shylock. He was bent on finding 
the meaning of life. In listening to him I always had 
a feeling, which has been heightened by reading his 
sermons, that he did not much care whether people 
would immediately accept his words or not, and that it 
would have spoiled him if he had cared. The main 
thing with him was to find the forward and upward 
path, and to keep faring ahead. He made on me the 
impression of a path-breaker continually calling back 
from new altitudes: "This is the way! I am press- 
ing on !" He seemed to rely on the essential humanity 
in men to forge forward in the same direction, and to 
make its own use of his pioneering. He would have 
been the last to propose his own preaching as a model 
for all preachers. It was merely his individual way 
of being a man and doing a man's work. More evi- 
dently than any other man I have known, Mr. Dew- 
hurst displayed the truth of an ancient proverb in its 



INTRODUCTION xm 

latest form: "Der Mut der Wahrheit ist der Talis- 
man." 

I was once in a small company, chiefly of ministers, 
when President Harper led the conversation with the 
bantering remark : "I have come to the conclusion 
that no one can be at the same time a popular preacher 
and an honest man." A long discussion followed of 
the different types of compromise which an intellectual 
man must make with his best self in order to catch the 
ear of the public. Mr. Dewhurst was so absolutely 
incapable of these compromises that he was a preacher 
for the few, not for the many. But if he were to be 
judged as a preacher alone, he would still be entitled 
to eminence. During his second pastorate, a peculiarly 
competent critic, who was a regular attendant at 
Trinity Church, Boston, but who spent the summer 
vacations at Burlington, wrote to me as follows: "If 
it were not for the single item of physical inequality, 
I firmly believe that Mr. Dewhurst would take rank as 
a preacher with Phillips Brooks. I get as much from 
the younger man's sermons as from the older." Dis- 
criminating members of each of his congregations have 
concurred in similar estimates. Yet it would obscure 
the supreme meaning of Mr. Dewhurst's life, if he 
were to be thought of as distinctively a preacher. As 
a pastor he did a quantity and a quality of work with 
such economy of system that his example would shame 
many a faithful minister; yet he was not distinctively 
a pastor. Mr. Moody would probably have been 
unable to understand what was meant if he had heard 



XIV INTRODUCTION 

Mr. Dewhurst called an evangelist. He was not even 
supposed to be "evangelical." Yet he was incessantly 
brooding over the young people of his parish, and 
reaching out after them, and trying to lead them into 
the church. In his last sickness he was appealing to 
them, and planning the work of Christian nurture 
which had prospered in his hands in his later years. But 
he was not distinctively an evangelist. There was a 
didactic element in all that he said. His influence in 
the Sunday school and in the week-day meetings of 
the church showed quick appreciation of educational 
improvement. Some of his friends often queried 
whether the professor's chair, rather than the pulpit, 
would not have been a more favorable center for his 
influence. But he was not distinctively a teacher. He 
was first and foremost a seeker after truth. Whatever 
he was besides, in his maturer life, was incidental to 
this central character and vocation. To his mind the 
working principles which experience had wrought out 
were rather raw materials of truth than completed 
knowledge. They were authoritative so long as more 
literal truth is beyond our grasp, but at best mere rudi- 
ments of the mysteries of life which remain to be 
discerned. 

If I were to select his epitaph, I think on the whole 
I should choose these words : "While ye have light, 
believe in the light, that ye may be the children of 
light." Mr. Dewhurst believed in the veracity of life, 
in the authenticity of life's revelations, and in the 
credibility of the evidence which the revelations con- 



INTRODUCTION xv 

tain. All this was the light to which he gave full 
faith and credit while committed to his chief life-task 
of arriving at completer light. To get more light ; to 
gain a higher, larger outlook; to sweep a broader 
horizon; to adjust a truer perspective; to see things 
in their real relations, were to him the first duty of 
man.* Action in accordance with the light was assumed 
as a matter of course, sooner or later, and, so far as: 
his temperament and talents permitted, he was faithful 
in trying to make men use the truth as a standard and 
rule of action. He was centrally, however, a dis- 
cerner of truth, rather than a persuader of other men 
to believe or obey the truth. Speaking psychologically, 
Mr. Dewhurst functioned less as a preacher than as an 
artist. To portray, to express, was his main effort. 
Persuasion was left largely to take care of itself. 

Judged intrinsically, not by its accidents, this book 
should be distinguished from the works of the preach- 
ers. It is a contribution to the literature of strenuous 
communion with God. 

Albion W. Small 



THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 



"Wherefore gavest thou not my money 
into the bank, and I at my coming should 
have required it with interest?" — Luke 
19:23. 



THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

We are beginning to realize that Jesus was a prince 
of story-tellers. We knew already, of course, that 
"he spake in parables;" but that phrase somehow 
seems so solemn and remote that we forget it means 
just the plain, familiar thing — "he told a story." 
Because these stories have come down to us in the 
Bible, moreover, and we have been accustomed to hear 
them read in a manner and tone of voice different from 
that which we associate with other books, we more 
than likely miss the sparkle of fancy, the play of 
imagination, the gentle light of humor, with which 
they were at first accompanied. 

Many of these stories of Jesus were told for the 
purpose of relieving a difficult situation. They took 
off the strain. It is proverbially true that the only way 
at times to put an end to controversy, when everything 
is getting tense and embarrassing for both parties, 
is to sidetrack it with a story. And the superb skill of 
Jesus in the use of anecdote reached a climax in his 
ability to extricate himself from controversy, when 
controversy was simply of no use whatsoever. 

Some of these stories of which Jesus made use had 
their roots in the tales of the Talmud, but in his telling 
they came to greater amplitude and into closer contact 
with actual life. He gives a picture where the Talmud 
sketches only an outline. The parable of the talents — 

3 



4 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

or, as we might call it, the story of the three invest- 
ments — is a case in point. The Talmud story relates 
that a certain king gave a deposit to each of three ser- 
vants. The first guarded it safely; the second lost it; 
the third defiled it, and committed a part to another to 
keep. After a time the king returned and demanded 
his deposits. Him who guarded it he praised, and 
made prefect of his house. Him who lost it he visited 
with capital punishment, and ordered that neither his 
name nor his possessions should remain. To the third 
he said : "Retain him until we see what the other will 
do in whose hands he left a part. If he has treated the 
deposit rightly, let this one be restored to liberty; but 
if not, let him be punished." Here perhaps is the germ 
of Christ's story of the talents which he brought so 
much nearer to life and the amplitude of human experi- 
ence. Yet to ears trained in the lore of the Talmud his 
story may have sounded strangely familiar, and for 
that very reason may have won attention and approval 
until its drift was perceived. 

It is this drift and bearing of the story which I ask 
you at this time to follow. We sometimes allow our 
interest to follow the surface incidents of the story, 
observing the respective uses and rewards of the differ- 
ing trusts ; but there is a gulf stream of the story into 
which we are not always drawn. Let us see, then, if 
we can follow that. It discloses itself in this swift, 
surprising question : "Why did you not put my money 
into the bank, that I might receive my own with 
interest?" 



THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 5 

Now, money put into the bank is possibly not quite 
so safe as money that is put into an old stocking and 
buried in the cellar. It is not so safe as the mysterious 
and proverbial treasure of Captain Kidd ; for that has 
never been found. Money in the bank is subject to 
certain perils — to the vicissitudes of human prudence 
and integrity, and to certain unpredictable calamities, 
such as that which has twice overwhelmed the cities of 
the Pacific coast. Nevertheless, money in the bank is 
moving and growing money. It is live capital. It is 
wealth put to service. You make the venture, you take 
the risk, you discount possible disaster, for the sake of 
gain and growth. In the last resort it is a question of 
emphasis. One may forego safety for the sake of gain; 
that is what two men in the story did. Or one may 
forego gain for the sake of safety; that is what the 
third man did. And the praise of Christ was given to 
the men who took the risk. He gave the primacy to 
gain and growth, rather than to safety and fixedness. 

At this point, therefore, his story stands in con- 
spicuous contrast with the Talmud story. For in the 
Talmud story the king gives the chief reward to the 
servant who safely guarded his deposit : he makes him 
prefect of the palace. Christ's story gives no praise or 
reward to the man who merely guarded his deposit, 
kept it safe, and gave it back intact. This was the man 
who came in for reproof. And, worst of all, he had 
his safeguarded talent taken away from him. 

Now, this is a difference which goes too deep to 
pass unnoticed; for it brings to view the two most 



6 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

radically opposed interpretations of life, of what 
human experience is, and how it grows ; of what truth 
is, and what we are to do with it. 

The contrast appears at once; for the issue was 
already on between Christ and the religious teachers of 
his day. That is why he told the story. Its application 
is obvious enough. The servant who guarded his 
deposit, and whom the Talmud praised, represents 
those learned and cautious rabbis whom Christ identi- 
fied with the man who hid his talent in the earth, 
because he was unwilling to take the risk of losing it. 
These were the men on whom he had his eye ; precisely 
the men of whom, in a different form of speech, h^ 
said at another time: "The kingdom shall be taken 
from you and given to a nation bringing forth the 
fruits thereof." 

Here, then, is the contrast. The rabbis held that 
the truth was a sacred tradition to be kept intact and 
handed down ; the law, a holy revelation to be revered 
and obeyed; and, lest at some unsuspected point it 
should be infringed, they invented the minor com- 
mandments — a chain of subtle casuistry which sur- 
rounded this sacred revelation and which they called 
"the hedge around the law." And there is no respect 
in which Jesus stands out in the open, as the comrade 
and champion of fearless thought, and of those who 
are willing to take ventures and to launch their soul's 
interest on the ocean of God, so much as in his avowed 
conviction that the truth, instead of being a treasure to 
be guarded, is capital to be used. It is a means of 



THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 7 

service, an instrument of life, something invested for 
the sake of its returns in character, in welfare, and 
in growth. 

The radical fact which comes to view in the situa- 
tion of Christ's time, the contrast of view between him- 
self and the Jewish rabbis, is the same which follows 
human history, along the line of intellectual progress 
and religious development, as a fissure in the rock, 
growing more wide and apparent; and in the field of 
religion it is a fact which becomes everywhere vital 
and significant, calling upon men to see clearly and to 
make their choice. The truth which we call the truth 
of revelation is either a deposit to be sacredly guarded, 
a tradition to be handed down intact; or else it is the 
truth which finds contact with all truth that comes to 
light in human experience — truth to be used and 
trusted, to be risked in the ventures which life demands 
as it moves on. Revelation is either something whose 
supreme test is its power to remain unchanged and 
unchanging — a static reality; or else it is something 
whose supreme test is its power to fructify life, to 
deepen and enhance its values, to give life significance 
as it keeps growing on — in a word, its power to prove 
a living and dynamic reality. 

The Jewish rabbis took the static view ; Jesus took 
the dynamic view. The Roman church, consistently 
and tenaciously, holds to the static view. It has an 
infallible tradition, an infallible church to guard that 
tradition, and an infallible head to interpret the tra- 



8 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

dition. It cannot change. And yet, in spite of itself, 
it has changed. 

The Protestant church struggles between the static 
and the dynamic views. Never in any formal way 
committed to the theory of revelation and truth as a 
growth in human experience, a talent to be given to 
the bankers, it is forced nevertheless, by its own inher- 
ent principle, to commit itself to that conception, or 
else fall back into the position of the Roman church 
from which it emerged. There is no middle ground; 
and the tremendous significance of what is going on in 
the world of Protestantism today is seen in this 
double current, sweeping a part of Protestantism back, 
and a part onward toward the open sea. It is there- 
fore a question of serious moment with us, whether 
we are willing to move onward, out of the quiet har- 
bor, into the deep sea, where there will be only the 
ocean around us and the sky above. 

Now, in a time of hesitation and of indecision over 
an issue so grave as this, it is perfectly natural and 
perfectly right that men everywhere should ask the 
question — and they will ask it with seriousness and 
concern precisely to the degree that the faith and the 
religious life has consequence in their eyes: If the 
truth of revelation is not the absolute, final, and 
authoritative thing we have supposed it to be, then 
what ground have we to stand upon, what security for 
the life of the spirit? 

As a partial answer to this question I ask you to 
note that this was precisely the question which the man 



THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 9 

with the one talent was tacitly asking. He was far 
the most careful and cautious man of the three. He 
said: "This talent is so precious and sacred that I 
must take no risks with it. I must incur no chance of 
loss. I must not speculate with it. I must not let it 
get out into the currents of secular life. I must give 
it back to my lord when he returns." And that seems 
at first a most laudable attitude — this cautious, rever- 
ent mood; this desire to be faithful to his trust; this 
controlling fear of loss or waste, the dread of any 
impairment to the trust committed. And, when the 
day of reckoning came, with pardonable pride he said : 
"Lord, here is thine own. This is the identical golden 
coin you put into my hands when you went away." 
The other men could not say that at all. The golden 
coins given to them had been merged in the great cur- 
rents of trade. At that moment, soiled, abraded, they 
may have been the counters of any transaction whatso- 
ever. They could not say : "Here, Lord, is thine own ;" 
they could only say: "I traded with thy talents, and 
lo, here are five more; here are two more." 

But when the man came with his one, unused coin, 
just as bright and new and untouched as when the 
master went on his journey, he was confronted with 
the indignant question: "Why did you not put my 
money to the bankers ?" And his answer, if it betrayed 
a timid and cautious soul, was nevertheless perfectly 
sincere and consistent : "I was afraid to take the risk 
of losing what was not my own." 

And this is the evident defense of anyone in 



io THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

times past or present, who feels constrained to main- 
tain the static or unchanging view of truth and revela- 
tion as the human guide. It was the defense of the 
rabbis. They could have said to Moses : "Here is thy 
law unchanged. We have watched over it and defended 
it through these weary years. It has suffered no abra- 
sion or impairment. Not one jot or one tittle is 
unobserved." 

It is also the splendid bulwark of the Roman 
church. Through all these years that church has stub- 
bornly maintained what it believes to be an unbroken 
and unchanging tradition, and at the final accounting 
it hopes to say: "Here, Lord, is thine own." 

But, in the light of the parable, and in the light of 
the mind of Christ as reflected in the parable, is it 
worth while to be able to say that? What if the Jew- 
ish rabbi could say: "Here is the law unchanged, 
unchanging, sacred" — if the maintenance of that legal 
tradition meant human oppression or impoverishment 
because of its failure to get into vital and organic con- 
nection with life ? Jesus had to break a hundred legal 
traditions in order to liberate life itself. It is said that 
Cromwell made every mistake known to military 
strategy, and yet won his battles ; and that is the great 
test of generalship — to win battles. Likewise, the test 
of law, commandment, truth, is that it shall strengthen 
and support and fructify life. And it was over the 
broken shards of ancient tradition that the bleeding 
feet of Jesus trod out a new highway into life. The 
letter of the law was killing men, and it needed the 



THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH n 

revelation of its spirit to give them life. There was 
needed that transfer from the static to the dynamic 
field which is so perfectly forecast in the words of 
Paul, who, under the spell of the spirit of Christ, was 
an emancipated man. "If," he said, "there had been a 
law given which could have given life, verily righteous- 
ness should have been by the law." 

Likewise, if the static view of things could vitalize 
and move the world, then the static view might be 
preferable. If you could formulate a truth, or frame a 
law, or establish a tradition, or organize a church, 
which should remain unchanged, and still elevate and 
fructify the life of man, then recourse might be had 
to that alternative. If you could have the absolute 
safety which comes from keeping truth out of circula- 
tion, and at the same time the gain, the increase, the 
accumulated dividends which accrue from pouring it 
into the channels of human thought and activity; if you 
could only say, "Lord, here is thy very own," and at 
the same time present the accrued dividends — then 
might you find justification for the man with the one 
talent. But that situation has never yet arisen. And 
when the choice is to be made on the side of gain and 
growth through venture, and the side of infallible cer- 
tainty and security, Christ, through his parable, 
delivers the determining vote in favor of the man who 
dares. 

Let us now come still closer to the question by 
means of which Christ condemned the man who did 



12 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

not dare. "Wherefore gavest thou not my money into 
the bank, and I at my coming should have required it 
with interest?" How does that apply to truth and 
revelation, and to the great spiritual issues of life? 
How does it answer the great, hungry questions of 
the soul that men are forever asking? 

We may get help on this question by recalling first 
what happens to our money when we send it to the 
banker. Our first act is to deposit the funds we have 
And this word "deposit" is an interesting word in this 
connection, because it is just the term which we find so 
often on the lips of the rabbis and legalists, the defend- 
ers of the static view of things. They are accustomed 
to speak of the sacred "deposit" of truth. Revelation 
is a "deposit" — that is, something given and settled in 
place, as a layer of soil is deposited on the surface of 
the earth. It is something essentially fixed and irre- 
movable, something which has come to stay. 

"Deposit" is also one of our current banking terms. 
When we place funds to our credit in the bank, in a 
certain theoretical and verbal sense they are deposited 
there, and we expect to find them there when we make 
demand. But in the actual economic and financial 
sense they are not deposited at all. A bank is not an 
eleemosynary institution to keep your ducats and mine 
from getting tarnished and stolen. It stands as the 
great intermediary between supply and demand. What, 
in bank parlance, you have deposited is swiftly diverted 
into the channels of industry. These countless deposits 
are useless in their merely deposited and safeguarded 



THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 13 

form. They are useful only as they move on into the 
endless energy of the world's life. The final destiny 
of all wealth is to be consumed. And the real justifica- 
tion for diverting portions of the world's wealth from 
immediate consumption lies in the fact that wealth 
turned back into capital will produce more wealth, and 
thus eventually vary and enrich the satisfactions of 
human desire. So there the banker stands — an inter- 
mediary between supply and demand ; between gold and 
silver ; railways, buildings, and steamships ; schools and 
colleges; art, music, travel; food and drink — all the 
instruments of life on the one hand, and life itself on 
the other. The money you deposit will never come 
back to you in identical form. It has gone coursing 
on its way toward some enrichment of life. But when 
it comes back to you it comes with increase of life- 
value and satisfaction. 

Let us return to the parable of Jesus and the use he 
made of his fruitful metaphor. He was talking about 
truth and religion, about revelation and the spiritual 
values of life, and he was speaking to men who made 
a specialty of protecting these spiritual values. He 
said, without shrinking or hesitation, that the accredit- 
ing of truth, the demonstration of spiritual values, is 
out in the open field of life. This truth, which you call 
religious truth, must be deposited, not as a stratum of 
tradition, but as capital in the bank. It must be broken 
up, and applied to the countless needs and industries of 
life. It must find its credentials in its workability. 
What it can do must be the final test of what it is. 



14 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

We have been so long accustomed to think of 
religious truth as a special kind of truth, as something 
off by itself, a kind of sacred tradition to be guarded 
by a special institution and a special body of men, that 
it comes a little difficult to press this parable of Christ's 
home to its real application, and to feel sure that all 
this great accumulation of religious truth must become 
the working capital of the world's life; that it must be 
broken up, and in a way lose its identity as religious 
truth, in order that it may flow into the current of the 
whole world's life and thought. It must have no cre- 
dentials of its own, and no fear of making ventures., 
or of testing what it is itself by those disclosures and 
experiences which come to the world along avenues 
which are not labeled religious. 

For instance, religious men have had many a tilt 
with the men of science. They have sometimes seemed 
to take it as an affront that the conclusions of science 
should invade their own chosen realm, and take issue 
with the religious tradition. But if, in reality, truth is 
to go to the bankers and get into circulation, then this 
is just one way of knowing that it is true and final and 
authoritative, viz., that it stands the test and scrutiny 
of kindred truth, and of facts equally august, which 
pour in from other sources. And it is just this will- 
ingness to put truth to the bankers, to find its accredit- 
ing out in the open mart of the world's life, which has 
proved to us, time and again, that it will come back, 
increased in value, bearing accumulated dividends — not 
the same truth, but a larger and truer truth. 



THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 15 

Then, again, in more immediate times, religious men 
have had their moments of anxiety and fear over the 
modification of view respecting the character and 
development of the Bible. The growth of the historic 
method, and the general acceptance of an increasing 
body of critical conclusions, reconstructive in character, 
have seemed more serious even than the earthquake. 
We are told and told again that it undermines faith. 
But we must remember that, if it undermine faith, it 
is the static faith which is undermined. The attitude 
which it makes no longer tenable is the attitude of the 
man who wanted to save his talent, and give it back 
unused, identical in form. 

To read the Scriptures as we read the other world- 
literature, to see in them the gradual unfolding of a 
people's religious life, is indeed to put them out to 
interest, and once more to find their accrediting where 
we seek the credentials of truth everywhere else. To 
say that the Bible is not an exclusively religious book 
in the sense that it is not a manual of religion, nor an 
arsenal of proof-texts, is indeed to throw it out into the 
world of circulation, and to let its identity mingle with 
that of other books. But when it comes back, it comes 
bearing dividends, interest-laden, with new values 
otherwise unsuspected and unexplored; and we see, as 
we did not see before, that, as one has said, it is "full 
of great voices that search the soul." 

And then, once more, when we bring religion face 
to face with all the grave and vital issues of the world's 



16 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

life today, the issues that grow out of the rapidly 
transforming conditions in the social and the political 
world; when we consider all these momentous ques- 
tions which are bound up with the fate of democracy 
and self-government, we are prepared to see how need- 
ful it is to have a religion which will make ventures, a 
faith which cares less for preserving its own traditions 
than for elevating and improving life. 

To bury our talent in a napkin is not merely to 
refuse to be of service; it is the mistake of desiring 
to be of service only in the one way of maintaining our 
talent untarnished, our tradition unbroken, our revela- 
tion unmodified and uncorrected by the growing 
claims of human need and human experience. It is 
not the sin of idleness, but the sin of traditionalism and 
unadaptability. It is the sin of the unventuresome 
faith. 

The world is full today of men and women who 
have ceased to believe in what the historic church for 
the most part has believed. They have ceased, or think 
they have ceased, to believe in God, the soul and immor- 
tality, and the many accumulated ideals of spiritual 
history which seem to most of us so good and fair. 
What then ? Shall we go on, in an isolated way, main- 
taining our fair belief, hiding the golden coin with its 
divine image and superscription, in the secret places of 
our hearts? Or shall we rather put it out to interest, 
turn it into the channels of human life, not in the way 
of controversy or apologies, not for the purpose of 
asserting the tradition, but only in the way of setting 
at work in this world of human need, still so starved 



THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 17 

and so naked, these forces which shall gradually create, 
as an atmosphere, what is now distrusted as dogma? 
It is out of the soil of fruitful and growing life, out 
of its conscious values and gains, that there grow up 
in man's life the truths which it is the real interest of 
religion to maintain. 

And when we put our truths and our ideals out to 
interest in this way, risking them in the life of the 
world, they come back to us — they have come back 
time and time again — with a meaning and a value we 
did not suspect they had. 

We come, then, to a final word. If by chance we 
are able or willing to be counted in with the servants 
who put their master's money out to the bankers, there 
is one further word of the parable on which we need 
to ponder : "Take therefore the talent from him, and 
give it to him that hath ten talents." It is little wonder 
that a bystander exclaimed in a kind of breathless 
wonder: "Why, Lord, he hath ten talents already!" 
But this is the law of life — not only that to him that 
hath shall be given, but to him who is already sensi- 
tive to responsibility, desirous of being open-minded 
and of making the great venture of faith, must be 
added the share of the irresponsible, the timorous, and 
the blind. 

The inference is clear and impressive: It is quite 
as solemn a thing to gain as it is to lose. The deter- 
mination to increase what the Lord hath given is the 
assumption of a responsibility, even more serious and 
grave than the man assumed who put his talent in the 



18 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

ground. If anyone has come to think of truth ; not as 
a tradition to be guarded and handed down, but as a 
port to be steered for by means of every compass he 
possesses, and the help of every star that shines in the 
heaven of his soul, how, for one moment, can he hold 
his responsibility to be less grave or great? If he 
fias come to think of faith as the venture of the soul 
by which he "proves all things and holds fast what is 
good," shall he not also realize that the very greatness 
of his task is the measure of the sincerity, the devotion, 
and the enthusiasm with which he must follow that 
task? Does anyone feel himself free in this infinite 
world of endeavor, and not also feel throbbing in his 
heart the sense of sonship which cries out: "Father, 
I have come to do thy will" ? 

It is indeed a vaster responsibility to be a friend of 
God than to be his slave; it is a more serious thing to 
be allied with the moving forces of the world, than to 
rest at any fixed point in the development of thought, 
or the history of the spiritual life. Every draught of 
freedom is a draught of the responsibility which free- 
dom demands — a responsibility which takes over the 
tasks of those who fail through idleness or fear, which 
puts to the bankers what they have buried in the earth, 
and which interprets into the need of today what they, 
through the unventuresome faith, are unable to inter- 
pret. 

Are we ready to have the sentence passed on those 
who fail, become an added charge of responsibility to 
us? Can we search our hearts, and make answer to 
this question ? 



EATING THE SHEWBREAD 



"Have ye not read what David did, 
when he was an hungered; .... how 
he entered into the house of God, and 
did eat the shewbread, which was not 
lawful for him to eat .... but only 
for the priests ?" — Matthew 12:3, 4- 



II 

EATING THE SHEWBREAD 

This vagrant act on the part of Israel's most dis- 
tinguished monarch had, in course of time, become a 
part of the Davidic legend. It was one of the stories 
accepted by everybody, and, being accepted, must be 
explained and justified. The act described precedes his 
kingship, and the story relates how, coming up hot and 
hungry, he demanded of the high-priest that he should 
give him the bread he was carrying in his hands, which 
happened to be hallowed loaves — the "presence-bread" 
just freshly prepared for the sanctuary. The practice 
of placing bread upon a table in the place dedicated to 
God incidentally discloses to us the kinship of the 
Hebrew religion with the religions of all other peoples, 
for it points us to a time when men offered food and 
drink to the divinity upon the assumption that the 
divinity partook of what was offered by the suppliant. 
Perhaps by David's time this primary idea had faded 
away, and the offering of the presence-bread had now 
become a pure rite and symbol, suggesting, it may be, 
nourishment which God gave, rather than nourishment 
which he required ; or quite as likely it had no definite 
meaning, but was a custom continued by sheer force of 
habit, all the more imperious and sacred because it 
could not be explained ; for it often happens that peo- 
ple cling most tenaciously to customs for which they 
can give no rational explanation, and which they can- 



22 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

not longer connect with reality. The presence-bread 
was now a part of the ordinary religious observances. 
At the end of the week fresh bread was prepared, and 
the bread which had remained upon the presence-table 
during the preceding week was then divided among 
the priests in service and eaten by them. David, com- 
ing up in hot haste and pretending that he was on 
business for King Saul which would brook no delay, 
found the high-priest in the act of making the weekly 
change of the bread, and, after some parley, succeeded 
in carrying it off for his own use. 

The story evidently made a profound impression, 
and in due time became part of the Davidic tradition. 
It would be interesting to trace the process by which 
the ecclesiastical class came to justify this profanation 
on David's part ; for it had evidently received at length 
a tacit approval. Everybody had heard how David 
ate the shewbread, and no one seemed to consider it 
a very grave sacrilege. So, when Jesus and his dis- 
ciples walked through the corn-fields on the sabbath, 
plucked the ears of corn, and ate them to appease their 
hunger, and were called to task for this profanation of 
sabbath observance, Jesus, with his customary adroit- 
ness, appealed to this story of David eating the hal- 
lowed bread. To be sure, some priest might have 
retorted: "One sacrilege does not justify another." 
But Jesus knew that no one would parry his thrust in 
that manner. David's profanation, in the course of 
time, had somehow got justified and accepted, and all 
that David did was to give his natural physical hunger 



EATING THE SHEWBREAD 23 

the precedence over a merely ceremonial observance. 
And this was all the disciples of Christ were doing. 
They were profaning the sabbath customs, as those 
customs had been amplified and interpreted. But they 
were hungry, and hunger came first. 

In a superb conclusion of the whole incident, Jesus 
said: "The son of man is lord even of the sabbath 
day." Humanity is the master, and not the slave, of 
the institutions which have sprung up around human 
life. Man, and not the institution, must be at the top. 
Man must explain things, and never allow things to 
explain him. Human need has the right of way — 
that is the principle on which Christ himself invariably 
acted; and in the application of this principle he found 
himself confronting the counter-current which con- 
nected sacredness, not with persons, but with forms and 
customs and institutions. 

It certainly simplifies things very much if one can 
clearly adopt this conclusion of Christ's and con- 
sistently apply it. Human hunger and need, human 
helplessness and welfare — these are primary, and these 
really sacred. What will most conduce to the growth 
and welfare of man, who is central among all the cus- 
toms and institutions which have grown up around 
him? Certainly it is a most august and inspiring prin- 
ciple; yet not always easy of application, even by the 
clear-sighted and the conscientious. 

But I think we can press still a little closer toward 
the heart of the subject than this. So once more let 
us come back to the story of David and the shew- 



24 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

bread. It is obvious that, in this instance, his hunger 
had the right of way. And the imperiousness of his 
hunger seemed to take away the profanation ' from 
his act. 

It is, however, something more than human need 
pitted against a sacred rite. It is a kind of unconquer- 
able reality invading the world of form and ceremony, 
of rite and tradition, and compelling it to give an 
account of itself. It is a real sanctity challenging an 
apparent and empty sanctity. There is something 
strong and masterful and tremendously real in the 
spectacle of this fearless, unsophisticated youth coming 
up to the high-priest and halting him, and making the 
issue there on the spot between the unquestioned reality 
of his own hunger and that vague, unexplainable some- 
thing which lay there in the background of a custom 
which was going on by virtue of its inertia. I should 
think that, after David had gone off with the shew- 
bread, the high-priest would have felt like retiring to 
his room, and, "going over his evidences," asking him- 
self the question, with much searching of heart : "What 
does this thing that I am doing here really signify? 
What reality underlies it which I can justify to myself 
and to other men?" 

But whether this high-priest, Ahimilech, the remote 
official of a primitive religion, asked these questions or 
not, it is good for us to ask them of ourselves. It is 
needful to bring our outward and formal religion to 
the test of a terrible sincerity. Events compel the 
test, even if we are unwilling to make it for ourselves. 



EATING THE SHEWBREAD 25 

In its great onward movement, humanity is continu- 
ally making the challenge ; and it is a challenge which 
cannot long go unanswered. Everywhere around us 
today men are doing what David did — they are eating 
the shewbread. And it behooves us to ask the question 
whether time will justify them, as it seems to have 
justified David, in an act which at first glance seems 
ruthless and profane. Let us see if this picturesque 
story of David will suggest an answer in any measure 
helpful and true. 

From the standpoint of our formal and organized 
religion, it is not uncommon to hear frequent expres- 
sions of alarm and fear. Men stand aghast over the 
secular drift of things; they feel concern over the loss 
of reverence, the waning of regard for authority, the 
insecure hold of religious customs and institutions, the 
sacrilegious treatment of what to other days and other 
men has seemed venerable and holy. 

Now, the question I raise is this: Can such pro- 
tests and fears as these be wholly genuine and sound 
until we put them side by side with that protest which 
represents the counter-drift? Do you say: "I am 
troubled over the increasing secular drift"? Well, is 
it not quite as pertinent for another man to say: "I 
am troubled over the sacred drift" ? What I fear is 
the effectiveness and value of a current which sets off 
by itself; and if the material and secular current, flow- 
ing by itself in one direction, will ultimately cut a man 
off from one kind of reality, so will a spiritual current, 
flowing off in a different direction by itself, cut a man 



26 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 



■■'• '0- ' '-'l ■■ 



off from reality of another sort. I suppose, then, that 
with almost equal truth we might say: "I fear the 
secular drift and I fear the sacred drift. I fear an 
organization of human life and society which will cut 
men off from the motives which feed the springs of 
worship and reverence and aspiration; but I fear just 
as much an organization of the religious life which 
exalts acts and customs and forms which have at least 
no obvious contact with reality, or human need and 
desire." 

Let me give point to this by taking you back once 
more to the story of David, and reminding you of that 
lovely incident which sheds its romantic beauty over 
his youthful life. Shortly after his coronation as the 
successor of King Saul, he was waging war against 
the Philistines. He was held in a kind of siege by the 
Philistine army. He was thirsty and he remembered 
the taste of the cool, refreshing water from the well of 
Bethlehem; and he cried out: "Oh, that one would 
give me drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem 
that is at the gate!" Three of his captains heard the 
king express this wish; and they broke through the 
Philistine line, at the peril of their lives made their 
way to Bethlehem, brought water from the well by 
the gate, and gave it to the king. Then what did 
David? He would not drink of it, but poured it out 
to the Lord and said : "My God forbid it me that I 
should do this thing. Shall I drink the blood of these 
men that have put their lives in jeopardy, for with the 
jeopardy of their lives they brought it?" 



EATING THE SHEWBREAD 27 

Put these two acts side by side: David eating the 
shewbread from the sanctuary and David refusing to 
drink the water which his loyal followers brought 
from the well of Bethlehem. You recognize at once 
the distinction between a true sanctity and a pseudo- 
sanctity; between a sacrilege which is real, and a 
sacrilege which is only apparent. There was no real 
profanation, only a formal profanation in eating the 
shewbread. But, with a fine and delicate sense, David 
felt that it would be an act of genuine sacrilege to drink 
the water which was brought at the peril of his friends. 
It cost too much. Its equivalent in human effort and 
devotion was something too precious to be swallowed 
in a draught to quench his thirst. 

There are several vital things which this test of 
reality, this eating of the shewbread, brings to view. 
First of all, it is a challenge to religion to justify itself, 
to keep its own meaning vividly before itself, to be 
dissatisfied with a merely hereditary survival of forms 
and customs. It must "prove all things and hold fast 
that which is good." There is greater peril that 
religion should obliterate itself than that it should be 
obliterated by what it fears as hostile counter-forces. 
There is danger that it will not be able to give an 
adequate account of itself; that some of its organs will 
cease to be vital, and some of its parts will lose their 
function. What do we mean to express by the things 
we are and do ? What was the shewbread for ? Sup- 
pose David had asked that question of the priest, when 



28 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

he hesitated to let David have it : "What is the shew- 
bread for?" I doubt if the priest could have answered 
the question. He did not know. He could have said 
that it was sacred; but he did not know why it was 
sacred. He had forgotten. Everybody had forgotten. 
It had just gone on being sacred after the thing which 
gave it sacredness in the first place had been both for- 
gotten and outgrown. Nobody now believed that the 
bread was there for God to eat. He did not eat bread. 
But it was still presented to him, and weekly replaced : 
and the priests ate what was left to prevent waste. If 
the priest had only been able to say to David, "You 
cannot have this bread to eat because it is there for 
God to eat," he would have had a strong and valid 
reason for refusing David's claim. But the only reason 
he had was a formal and empty one, which could not 
hold its own against a pressing human claim. 

Do you remember the story of the Russian princess 
who drove one day into the palace grounds, and saw a 
rose bush, growing too near the edge of the driveway, 
so that its branches had been grazed and broken by the 
passing wheels ? On arriving at the palace she directed 
that a special sentinel should be stationed at the rose 
bush to protect it — and it was done. In fact, it was 
so thoroughly done that, years afterward, when the 
princess and all the people of her time had gone the 
way of mortal flesh, some other member of the royal 
family was driving through the palace ground. A 
sentinel was standing in the same place. It was an 
unlikely and unnecessary spot for a guard, and after a 



EATING THE SHEWBREAD 29 

while this curious person determined to inquire why a 
sentinel was stationed at this particular spot. The 
royal records were searched, and it was found that 
years before a princess, out of sweet, maidenly love for 
a beautiful flower, had sent someone to protect it in its 
helplessness. And the order had never been counter- 
manded. Sentinels came and went. It was now a part 
of the royal routine. Once started, there was nothing 
to stop it. And here, for how many years I know not, 
a soldier in full Russian uniform, with all the authority 
of the Czar vested in his person, had been protecting 
the memory of a rose. 

Now, suppose someone who with an insatiable 
desire for asking questions comes to you, who believe 
in the validity and permanent need of religion, and 
asks you the question : "What are you standing there 
for ? I do not see anything there that needs protecting 
or watching. What are you standing on guard for?" 
We ought to be able to give a better answer than to 
say we are guarding the place where once a rose 
bush was. 

The primary demand, then, is the demand to be 
real. If we believe in a thing, we must know why we 
believe in it. If we perpetuate a movement or an insti- 
tution, the underlying reasons for that perpetuation and. 
interest should have at least sufficient clearness in our 
eyes to keep us from the terrible palsy that besets the 
indifferent and the insincere. If we believe in the. 
religious life, and in a church of some kind as the 
expression of that religious life, let us be able to give 



30 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

a reason for the faith that is in us. Do we set forth 
shewbread in the sanctuary? Let us be able to say 
why we put it there. 

Let us not, however, overlook the fact that the same 
act or observance or custom may have different mean- 
ings to different times, and justly so. The only require- 
ment is that they shall have some meaning based in 
reality. It did not condemn the shewbread that men 
had ceased to believe that it was for God to eat. The 
condemnation was that men did not know that it had 
any meaning. 

There was a time when Christian baptism was held 
to be so essential a thing that the rite itself almost con- 
ferred and sealed the salvation of the soul. And "the 
fierce Tertullian," as Arnold calls him, taught that no 
man, sinning after the act of baptism, could hope for 
salvation. 

Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave 
Who sins, once washed by the baptismal wave. 

But those crude and literalistic notions have, for the 
most part, passed away, and to most people baptism 
remains as a natural and beautiful symbol of consecra- 
tion to a clean life, or as the dedication of an innocent 
child to the great household of God into which he 
comes by birth, with a claim upon the love of the whole 
family that is in heaven and on earth. It does not con- 
demn the symbol that its former crass and impossible 
meaning is merged into one more beautiful and reason- 
able. Its condemnation would lie only in its dogged 



EATING THE SHEWBREAD 31 

and systematic observance, without knowing or caring 
that it had any meaning beyond the fact that it was 
commanded and must go on. That would be suicidal 
to all genuineness and reality. 

Men once regarded prayer as a means of besieging 
the divinity; of extorting from him help which he 
would not otherwise bestow ; of changing the order of 
events, the laws of the world, the conditions of human 
experience. Presumably most men now think of prayer 
as a form of communion with the Highest; as expres- 
sive of a sense of fellowship which we have with the 
Sources of our life; as the vehicle of thoughts and 
desires and aspirations which are too intimate and 
tender to find another outlet. We may express in 
prayer what we may not in ordinary conversation or 
discourse. Its reality is not challenged by reason of 
this transformation of its meaning. That condemna- 
tion would come to it only on the basis of a wooden 
observance of it, as something carried in the current 
of habit, whose meaning we did not even stop to scruti- 
nize. The test of reality, I repeat, therefore is the 
demand that things shall have a meaning to us. 

But the test of reality brings us to another result. 
For the farther we push into the meaning and sources 
of the religious life, the more convinced we become 
that religion always associates itself with human need 
and welfare, and the more certain we become that the 
shewbread represents, not the fact that God is hungry 



32 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

and expects his worshipers to feed him, but that man is 
hungry and that God is pledged to feed him, and 
religion is the abiding symbol of that fact. 

Do you remember the quaint story of the Godwin 
Sands? Off the coast of England is this stretch of 
shoals which the sailors dread. And there are many 
legends and superstitions as to their origin. One night, 
in a village tavern of the region, a group of people 
were discussing the question, and an old sailor, whose 
memory went back to a time long before the shoals 
appeared, gave his reason. " 'Twas the Tenterton 
church steeple did it," he insisted. When pressed for 
an explanation, he went on to say that, years before, 
there had been a good strong wall built as a barrier 
against the sea; for mighty storms had swept along 
that coast, washing away the sandy formation of the 
bluffs, and the wall was built as a protection against 
the encroaching sea. Then came long years, and no 
storms; and finally the bishop of the region, needing 
stone to complete the parish church, took them from 
the sea-wall, and the graceful spire went climbing into 
the heavens. And then the next winter the storms 
came again, the peasants' lands were washed into the 
sea — and the dreaded shoals remain till this day; so 
that it was quite literally true, as the old sailor insisted, 
that " 'twas the Tenterton church steeple did it." 

Now, if it should ever really appear that the inter- 
ests of religion were something apart from the genuine 
interests and welfare of human life; if it should come 
to be believed that God wanted an institution, a system- 



EATING THE SHEWBREAD 33 

atic observance of worship on his own account, and 
for his own sake; if there should ever settle into the 
general consciousness a conviction that man was being 
robbed in order that the church steeple might be built, 
it would doubtless mean at length the obliteration of 
religion itself. The mere suspicion that this is so, the 
existence of conditions that lend even a faint color to 
such an inference, has already resulted in the aliena- 
tion of multitudes of people who in their own immedi- 
ate day and generation will probably never be 
reclaimed. 

If there is anything which stands central in the 
teaching of Christ, it is the doctrine of the essential 
sacredness of human life, and the conviction that our 
reverence for God is bound up with our reverence for 
the life of man, and that we are to abhor as the 
supreme sacrilege, not the eating of the shewbread, 
whose symbolism more than likely is forgotten, but the 
drinking of the water of Bethlehem, which through 
our blind selfishness might mean the drinking of the 
blood of human life. No worship can be adequate, 
however splendid or ornate, however glorious in his- 
toric memories, if it means only saying "Lord, Lord." 
No worship can be unacceptable, however humble or 
obscure, however devoid of historic precedent, if it 
means the sincere and faithful and loving effort to do 
the will of God. 

But it is time now to hasten to the conclusion. The 
special emphasis to which our subject has led us today 



34 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

may at points seem to join forces with those whose 
allies we would not willingly be. And I should there- 
fore like to leave the subject at a point where we may 
see the parting of the roads. I said, at the outset, that, 
everywhere around us today there are men who arc 
eating the shewbread. But some are eating it with 
their faces looking downward, whence they catch the 
shadows of the carnal struggle through which man has 
come; others are eating it with their faces looking 
upward, whence they catch the light that falls upon 
them from the heights to which man still has the power 
to climb. Some are eating the shewbread because in 
them the power of the spirit has waned, and life has 
settled down to a dull and hopeless commonplace; 
others are eating it because in them the might of the 
spirit still struggles for an expression of human 
capacity and growth, which their lips do not yet know 
quite how to frame. And in the incidental confusion 
the two processions, moving in opposite directions, are 
confounded together, just as Jesus by his sane and 
human attitude to life put himself in the way of being- 
called a glutton and a wine-bibber, a friend of publi- 
cans and sinners. And we can readily believe that the 
wine-bibbers and gluttons would have been quite will- 
ing to join with the Pharisees in making the charge. 
For the truth is that Christ belonged to neither the one 
class nor the other. So in this mighty struggle which 
has been going on somewhere through all time, and 
which is gathering volume and force anew — that strug- 
gle which antagonizes the merely sacerdotal interpre- 



EATING THE SHEWBREAD 35 

tation of religion and life — it is easy to say: "This 
means the downthrow of the priest and his utter 
annihilation;" whereas it means the supremacy of that 
great idea of a Scripture-writer who said: "Ye shall 
all be priests unto God ;" for it foretells the elevation of 
life, and all its work and all its relations and ties, into 
a sacramental and divine significance. It is easy, 
again, to say: "This means the downfall of religion 
and the twilight of the gods;" whereas it means the 
fulfilment of the sublime prophecy : "They shall teach 
no more every man his neighbor and every man his 
brother, saying, 'Know ye the Lord;' for they shall 
all know me from the least of them unto the greatest 
of them, and I will put my law in their inward parts, 
and in their heart will I write it." 

And this is the parting of the ways. It is the angle 
at the cross-roads where Jesus stood when he refused 
to ally himself with either secularist or ecclesiastic. 
The eating of the shewbread, which is the demand of 
religion that it shall at every step disclose its relation 
with reality, means not the degradation of life to the 
demand of hunger, the hunger of the brute and the 
sty; but it means the elevation of life in every range 
of its reality, until we shall be able to translate its 
primordial hunger and appetite into the beatitude of 
the Master : "Blessed are these who hunger and thirst 
after righteousness, for they shall be filled." 



"THINK ON THESE THINGS" 



"If there be any virtue and if there be 
any praise, think on these things." — 
Philip pians 4:8. 



Ill 

"THINK ON THESE THINGS" 

It has been repeatedly said in recent years, by those 
who have been making fresh observation of our human 
powers in action, that the real freedom of the will con- 
sists in our ability to fix the attention on a given 
object. The mind is a kind of terminal station where 
the train of impressions and ideas, coming in from the 
outer world, changes engines and at once hastens back 
as a train of impulses and reactions upon the outer 
world. Thus the circuit is complete. And by our 
conscious power of concentrating the attention on 
what is taking place — or, to use Paul's phrase, our 
power "to think on these things" — we largely deter- 
mine our character. 

After a train of thought is established, especially 
after ideas and impressions are repeated and become 
fixed in habit, grooving for themselves channels for 
movement in the nervous system, there is doubtless left 
to us very little actual freedom. Things then move on 
in a relentless way, either toward the desired haven or 
to shipwreck on the rocks. Confirmed habitual action 
does away with the necessity for free and spontaneous 
choice. That is what habit is for. It is the great time- 
saver and the great strength-saver of human life; and, 
like all good things, the reverse side shows up in an 
appalling and sinister way. The threads of the splendid 
tapestry go through to the back side. But it is only the 

39 



40 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

front that shows color, form, pattern, and beauty of 
design. 

Neither the habitual toper nor the habitually tem- 
perate person is quite free. The toper has repeatedly 
cut off the paths of escape into sobriety ; the temperate 
man has deliberately cut off the paths of escape into 
intemperance. The habitual thief cannot keep his hand 
out of the money-till or the pockets of other people. 
The habitually honest man reaches a point at length 
where he cannot steal if he would. But goodness and 
badness tend to become automatic. Every added vir- 
tue or vice is ceaselessly forging new bonds of steel for 
the hands and feet of the soul. Thus is written in the 
very mechanism of the body the striking saying of 
Scripture : "With the upright thou wilt show thyself 
upright, and with the froward thou wilt show thyself 
froward." 

But in the power and act of attention, in the ability 
to concentrate the inward gaze and to think on these 
things, we are free. We are all conscious of the ability 
to fix the mind on the thing with which we are at the 
moment engaged. And we are equally aware of the 
facility with which the mind grows inattentive and list- 
less, so that nothing is sharply defined or clearfy 
grasped. 

It is easiest, perhaps, to understand the real signifi- 
cance of the power of attention by recalling for a 
moment some of the familiar illustrations of the oppo- 
site thing. How often, for instance, we sit down with 
a book which demands alertness of mind and concen- 



"THINK ON THESE THINGS" 41 

tration of thought, if we are to get the sequence of 
ideas. We read on and on, sentence after sentence 
and paragraph after paragraph, when suddenly we 
realize that we are not following the thought. The 
eye is reading, but the mind is not. Possibly some 
suggestion of the book itself opened a switch, and of! 
we went on a side-track. Or it may be that the open 
window attracted us, or the roar from the distant foot- 
ball field surges in upon us just as we are engaged 
with a description of the Russian war with the Japa- 
nese, so that Port Arthur and Mukden and Marshall 
Field are all jumbled together in our minds. But 
presently there comes a moment when we call a halt. 
We issue mandatory orders to the mind to stop its 
wool-gathering and attend strictly and solely to the 
matter in hand. We turn back to the place where we 
left the main track, and once more ideas begin to 
assemble and co-ordinate themselves with one another. 
The field of vision, that was blurred, grows clear and 
distinct, just as when you sharpen the focus of the 
lens in the camera. 

The old-time preachers used frequently to begin 
their sermons by saying : "Brethren, I ask your undi- 
vided attention to the subject contained in the text." 
And well they might, for any man may naturally be 
jealous of the scant thirty minutes once or twice a 
week offered him for conveying ideas and proclaiming 
a message which confessedly has importance enough 
for people to come together to hear. And it is easy to 
appreciate the clever artifice of the preacher who, mid- 



42 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

way in his discourse, suddenly proceeded to give the 
boundaries of the United States. "Atlantic Ocean, 
Gulf of Mexico, Pacific Ocean" — that was doctrine 
unfamiliar enough to wake the soundest sleeper in the 
pews; after which, in due order, the Calvinistic 
theology went on to the end. But the device was 
sound; for to grasp even the Institutes of Calvin one 
must bring the tribute of an attentive mind. 

Not long since I experienced some rather mingled 
sensations in listening to a sermon built upon the prin- 
ciple of the merry-go-round, with convenient and fre- 
quent stops for getting on or off — points where the 
discourse was interrupted by some diverting or trivial 
anecdote, contrived for the obvious purpose of arous- 
ing the lagging attention of the audience. And I felt 
all the more keenly that really serious discourse 
deserves to be rather like an express train, from which 
if you got off you could not get on, and from which, 
when once really on, you could not get off, and which 
ought to be able to make its terminal without the aid 
of sleeping-cars. 

But lest even this digression shall seem to be of 
the sort described, let us come back at once to the 
thought we are considering — namely, that in our mani- 
fest power to fix the attention, to put our minds to an 
idea, or a train of impressions, we are free. In the 
use of that power we determine what we shall be. And 
inasmuch as these multitudes of disorganized impres- 
sions, which throng the highways of our senses, were 
meant to be organized by the mind, and to issue forth 



"THINK ON THESE THINGS" 43 

in the form of acts and deeds, it follows that our prac- 
tical efficiency in life, the thing we do, the manner of 
our doing it, and the value of the thing done, all come 
back at last to the use we make of our powers of con- 
centration, upon how we "think on these things." 

Nothing is more instructive as a clue in education 
than to observe how, with all the hungry and eager 
aptitudes of his mind, a boy will watch a man at work 
doing something that the boy thinks he too would like 
to do. He will leave his dinner untasted on the table 
to watch the umbrella-mender on the porch, or the 
plumber in the kitchen, or the carpenter with his tools, 
or the blacksmith shoeing a horse ; and his little fingers 
will just itch to get hold of the tools and help. It is 
simply joy to a boy to let him help when something 
is going to be done. 

I chanced to see the other day, in the hands of a 
youngster of my acquaintance, a new and evidently 
home-made type of pop-gun. A spool, a rubber band, 
a little twine, a plunger whittled out rudely — and there 
was an implement of which neither Krupp nor Gat- 
ling need be ashamed. When I questioned this same 
youngster as to the origin of the weapon, I received 
this laconic but philosophical reply: "I saw another 
boy have one. I looked at it a minute. I thought I 
could make one like it, and I did." 

Now, where can you find a more condensed for- 
mula of the whole meaning of life than that boy's 
reply? "I saw" — observation through the powers 
that connect us with the outer world. "I looked at it" 



44 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

— undivided, voluntary, and critical attention. "I 
made one like it" — the conversion of the idea into a 
new reality, a personal act. And that is all there is to 
it; that is all there is to it for any of us: "I saw; I 
looked at it; I did it." And the point where we make 
our personal contact and determine the character of 
the result is the point where we look at a thing. It is 
there and then that we give our mind to it. That is 
the way in which we "think on these things." 

The practical bearing of this on the formation of 
character is so obvious that it hardly needs further 
emphasis. Here is the impressive fact that in this 
continuous circuit we are ever following — the circuit 
which begins with the things we perceive, the impres- 
sions we receive, and which ends with the thing we do 
and become — there is one point where we are unmis- 
takably a determining agent in the result. There is 
one supreme and critical moment where we have 
our hand upon the lever and dictate the movement oc 
the train. 

Today, it may be, you are under sudden provoca- 
tion to use for your own benefit, and in hope of gain, 
funds which are in your hands as a trust. That provo- 
cation is not of your choosing. You are, perhaps, in 
no respect responsible for the temptation. It was 
simply swept along your way, and the wreckage is 
thrown up by the tide at your feet. And it may be 
that next week or next year you will again not be 
responsible directly for what you are and do then. 
You will be in the resistless current of a strong, upright 



"THINK ON THESE THINGS" 45 

character, made up of countless single choices; or of 
a corrupt character, resulting from numberless wrong 
choices. But today, at this moment, you can decide 
and choose. You can so focus this provocation which 
comes your way as to see it more clearly. You can 
fix your mind upon it. You can "think on" this thing. 
You can estimate it in the light of its consequences; 
and, with your firm hand upon the lever, you can hold 
the train to the right of way upon the main track. 

I confess that there seems to be an element of irony 
in facing a man who has become a confirmed criminal, 
a moral reprobate, a habitual sot, and saying to him: 
"You need not be what you are. You can turn around 
and walk the upward path." But there is no irony — 
only sober and sobering truth — in saying : "There was 
one moment when you did not think on these things. 
There was a passing instant when it was in your power 
to focus the lens — to let your mind grasp the signifi- 
cance of things in their entirety. There was one 
moment when you, a free man, came into the situation 
with your freedom. And that moment you did not 
use aright." "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever 
things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatso- 
ever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, 
whatsoever things are of good report — if there be any 
virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these 
things." 

But we need now to take one step further. For 
there would be no freedom and no significance in fix- 



46 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

ing attention on a given object, unless an alternative 
were offered us — some power of choice, some oppor- 
tunity for rejection. Therefore at this point we stum- 
ble on the important matter which our teachers of 
today describe as the power of "selective attention." 
It is through the exercise of this power that we get 
such wide ranges, and so many varieties of character. 
We become finally like the type of things we con- 
tinually attend to and select, just as our next-door 
neighbor tends constantly to grow toward the type of 
things which we deliberately reject. 

That admirable artist and author, the elder Gibson, 
relates a conversation which he had with a dapper 
young man who had just returned from a mountain- 
climb at Conway, aglow and exultant. He had "done 
it" in two hours, and was the lion of the occasion on 
free exhibition to an admiring circle of hotel guests 
and friends. The interview is quite worth relating in 
Mr. Gibson's inimitable manner. Anticipating the same 
climb himself on the following day, he thus questioned 
the hero of the afternoon : 

"Is there a fine view on the other side of the mountain ?" 

"Oh, yes." 

"What are its particular features." 

"Well, I don't remember just what — er — er — mountains and 
so forth." 

"What sort of a path?" queried I further, getting down to 
hardpan. 

"Oh, nice and shady nearly all the way." 

"Mostly hard-wood trees, I presume?" 

"Yes, er — er — principally white birch, and er — some spruce." 



"THINK ON THESE THINGS" 47 

After each reply he would come to a dead pause and gaze 
fondly at his pedometer. 

In point of fact, as I afterward discovered, the white-birch 
growth consisted of a single tree near the summit, almost the 
only solitary birch in sight of the path, which was embowered 
for miles with beautiful maples and great smooth beeches, besides 
numerous aspens, poplars, mountain-ash, and spruces. The birch 
tree in question was a huge gnarled veteran, in color as glaring 
as a whitewashed sign-board, and in further simulation scarred 
with sculptured names and hieroglyphics, among which were the 
newly engraved initials of our friend. In all his tramp it seems 
he had not seen a single flower. He could remember some 
whortleberries and raspberries, while the only bird he was enabled 
to recall was a "bright scarlet fellow" — a tanager, of course — 
bright and fiery enough to have burned a hole in the memory of 
an imbecile. The whortleberries and raspberries had appealed to 
another sense more highly cultivated and susceptible; and it was 
doubtless the same tireless craving of those precious jaws that 
led to the discovery of a spruce tree by the lump of chewing-gum 
upon its baited trunk. 

And if you are interested to learn with what eyes 
Mr. Gibson himself made the same mountain-climb, 
what he saw, and how he has recorded it, I must refer 
you to his most charming book, upon Highways and 
Byways — and perhaps you will come away from read- 
ing it, as I often have, with those Old Testament words 
disclosing, by way of contrast, a new application to 
your mind: "Eyes have they, but they see not; ears 
have they but they hear not." It is, moreover, an 
admirable illustration of the power of selective atten- 
tion and its results. For one may easily imagine that 
this same young man would go on through life — proba- 
bly he is alive somewhere now — and never see any- 



48 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

thing that the artist saw, never catch sight of the vision 
or feel the joy of those more subtle impressions which 
thronged the path he trod on that summer afternoon, 
and which throng every highway and byway of our 
wonderful world. 

Now, this leads us straight to a very striking and 
important conclusion. It leads us to this conclusion: 
Our world is just what we make it — just as large or 
small, just as good or bad, as we make it through the 
things that we habitually attend to and select. No 
mistake is greater than the mistake of supposing that 
we all live in the same kind of world. It is true only 
in the most external and superficial sense. 

You have only to look a little below the surface to 
see how this uniform and unaltering world breaks up 
into variety and difference. Suppose you are riding to 
town on the morning train: That man in the seat 
beside you, his face hidden behind the morning paper, 
is a conspirator against law and order. It may be he 
is an expert counterfeiter, and someone's name will be 
forged on a check today. Or perhaps he has in his 
pocket ten thousand dollars of which he is the trustee, 
and which he is going to risk as a flyer in the stock 
market. Or perhaps he is a contractor just on his way 
to order a cheaper construction for a building, the con- 
tract for which, requiring work and material of the 
first quality, he has just signed; or he is on his way to 
join a gang of cheap burglars; or to get the bribe 
promised him for the delivery of his vote at the last 
election. There are many kinds of conspiracy against 



"THINK ON THESE THINGS" 49 

law and order. But there is a certain element in com- 
mon. Through the power of selective attention, 
through the giving-heed to certain motives and appeals, 
and through the stamping of these into indelible acts, 
these men have been building up their world. They 
see certain things with fatal clearness. They respond 
to a definite order of impressions, and with unseeing 
eyes they move through the world which constitutes the 
joy and strength and satisfaction of other men. 

Now, it may be that to your neighbor opposite you 
in the same car the civilization of our mighty modern 
world has opened new incentives and new avenues for 
choosing the good and for building up a larger world. 
He will do something today to counsel for righteous- 
ness, to stem the tide of corruption. He will stand 
for honesty in private life and public act. He will 
swear to his own hurt and change not. He will remem- 
ber that there are things in this world that are honor- 
able, and lovely, and true, and of good report, and he 
will think on these things, and thinking on them he will 
make them his own. His world will widen, and its 
sky will lift; he will grow greater in stature, and, as 
the old prophet has it, "he will stand upon his feet, 
and God will speak to him." And at length, through 
the confirmation of these alternatives into choice and 
deed, he too will go through the world with unseeing 
eyes, blind to the things that corrupt and degrade, and 
that make a man dead at heart. 

A man's world is just as large as he makes it — just 
what he makes it. As he thinketh in his heart — down 



50 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

in that laboratory of personal choices and decisions — 
so is he. 

I shall claim just a moment longer in order to ask 
you to connect with the train of thought we have been 
following one further word from this same apostle 
Paul, who, writing in a remote antiquity, seems always 
to be stumbling upon ideas which modern thinking is 
making fresh and vital for us again. In an earlier 
passage of this letter to the Philippians, so full of ten- 
der and noble sentiment, he writes: "Let this mind 
be in you which was in Christ Jesus." 

There have been many definitions of what it really 
means to be a Christian. It has meant the acceptance 
of the body of Christian doctrine; or association with 
the historic Christian church ; or the emotional experi- 
ence of sin, with its corresponding acceptance of 
redemption in the name of Christ. But in many a 
varied form this first great Christian writer frequently 
declares that it consists in having the mind of Christ. 

What a scope and vision of life such words dis- 
close to us ! To have the mind of one who, through 
an expanding experience, based upon the choice of the 
best and greatest things of life, has built around him a 
great and growing world! To have the mind of the 
myriad-minded Shakespeare — what would that not 
mean in the appreciation of the scope of human life, of 
its tragedy and comedy, its sorrow and joy ! To have 
the mind which can open to us such a world of tone 
and its undreamed-of possibility as that of Richard 



"THINK ON THESE THINGS" 51 

Wagner — how full of meaning it is! To have the 
mind of a Gladstone, which should grapple with world- 
problems and grasp the significance of a world- 
civilization — what possibilities of human achievement 
it suggests ! 

And to have the mind of Christ; to see things 
steadily and see them whole, as he saw them ; to focus 
the whole field of life so that you see in one vision 
the glory of the earth and of the distant heavens; 
perceive the relation of things in their universal 
aspects ; feel your heart throbbing with the new values 
of truth, of righteousness, of love; behold the glory of 
the face of the Father, in the new meaning of all the 
common things and the familiar relationships of daily 
life; to have the mind that actuated and controlled that 
One who for a few years dwelt among us, full of 
grace and truth — this is a greater experience, and a 
greater education, than to possess the literature of 
Shakespeare, the music of Wagner, and the states- 
manship of Gladstone combined. Moreover, just as 
having the mind of Shakespeare would mean to see 
men and the vast field of human life as he saw it; just 
as having the mind of Wagner would mean to experi- 
ence the profound enrichment of musical expression 
as he perceived it; and just as having the mind of 
Gladstone would be the widening of our political hori- 
zons and the perception of world-history in its making ; 
so having the mind of Christ — does it mean aught else 
than giving heed to those things, and, through giving 
heed, more and more choosing those things, that are 



52 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

abiding and universal — wholly human because wholly 
worthy ; the things which give height and breadth and 
cubic capacity to human life? 

Shall we not agree with Paul that we must go to 
this great Schoolmaster to learn the true value of the 
best things of life; to learn the truest meaning of the 
things that are true and honorable and of good report ; 
and, then, "to think on these things" until they become 
wholly ours? 



THE SPIRIT WITHIN THE WHEELS 



"And the wheels were lifted up over 
against them: for the spirit of the 
living creature was in the wheels"— 
Ezekiel 1:20. 



IV 
THE SPIRIT WITHIN THE WHEELS 

Symbolism like this is so remote from our own 
habits of expression that I have no wish to entangle 
you in its toils ; certainly no inclination to go guessing 
its meaning part by part. We may, however, attempt 
to seize the central idea — to pluck the blossom, as it 
were, which opens out of this strange lotus plant of 
the imagination. 

From the curious movements, and fantastic lights 
and colors, of this weird vision there seems then to 
come a lesson to the people of today. The lesson we 
may learn is this, that in the intricate movement of 
the world's life, in the interplay of its countless wheels 
of activity, its industry and art, its labor and play, its 
education and commerce, its political and social growth, 
its groups of families and friendships — within all this 
movement, giving to it meaning and direction, there is 
a spirit, and "the spirit of the living creature is in the 
wheels." 

Let us not pretend that Ezekiel saw spread out 
before his vision a panorama of the world as we see 
it spread out before our own eyes today. He would 
not have comprehended it, had he seen it. No one 
comprehends it. It is too vast and awful. It is our 
perplexity, and sometimes our despair. But Ezekiel 
belonged in the great company of the seers and poets. 
And these men have had a tenacious hold upon the 

55 



56 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

moral threads which run through the labyrinth of life, 
and almost without exception have been persuaded that 
within this outward spectacle of life there is a divine 
idea, and, that running through it and controlling it, 
there is a divine meaning and plan. They have felt the 
commotion of our unresting life, the clamor of inter- 
ests, and the confusion of tongues. They have heard 
the whirring of the wheels; but they have also seen 
the spirit of the living creature in the wheels. 

The question for us, therefore, is whether we our- 
selves can live in the strength of the conviction in 
which such men as these have lived. As we dwell 
among the multiplying interests and claims of life, as 
we see the machinery of life increasing, and feel the 
tremendous inpact of the outward bulk and body of 
life, can we at the same time keep steady enough to 
see the purpose that is shaping it? Can we go down 
tomorrow to the center of the city's life, where the 
very earth trembles with the revolving of the wheels, 
and can we there see the spirit of the living creature 
in the wheels? Can we do the visible work of life, 
and perform with diligence and thrift and energy its 
appointed tasks, and yet "live as seeing Him who is 
invisible"? 

These are some of the questions which we have to 
help each other to answer; questions that haunt one's 
dreams, and lie heavy on one's heart, so momentous are 
they, and so mightily do they press to the forefront of 
our life. 

But. be fore we can plunge into these questions more 



THE SPIRIT WITHIN THE WHEELS 57 

fully, we must stop for a word of explanation; and 
that explanation may mean the burning of a bridge or 
two behind us. There is a remarkable volume by the 
lamented Sabatier, the title of which indicates a dis- 
tinction I wish to make. Sabatier writes upon The 
Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit. 
Now, whenever any fact or question touching religion 
is raised, we are likely to think at once of those things 
which are grouped around our ecclesiastical institu- 
tions and which grow out of them. Through the 
course of centuries the Christian church has gathered 
to itself a certain prestige and authority. Out of it 
have come influential theologies, interpretations of 
God, codes of conduct, regulations of life; so that in 
one aspect of the matter the Christian church repre- 
sents a religion of authority. Now, the essential 
counterpart of authority is obedience; and it is for this 
reason that the religious spirit has so often been inter- 
preted in terms of implicit docility and obedience. 

At the bedtime hour, the other night, my boy and 
I were reading together a chapter from the Jungle- 
Book. You remember the night when the camel got 
scared, and waked up the troop horses, and the battery 
mules, and the gun bullocks, and the elephants so that 
they lay awake all night talking to each other, and 
giving their views of things in general. What delight- 
ful animal-talking it is ! But it all comes to a conclu- 
sion which I am sure must voice Mr. Kipling's ideas 
about the authority of empire. For you know how it 
says that the mule, and the horse, and the elephant obey 



58 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

their drivers, and the driver his sergeant, and the ser- 
geant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, the 
captain his major, the major his colonel, the colonel 
his brigadier, and the brigadier his general, who obeys 
the viceroy, who is the servant of the empress — "thus 
it is done." 

And thus, indeed, it is done, both in matters of 
empire and in matters of religion, wherever the under- 
lying assumption is that the life of man must at every 
point be regulated and controlled. Through an ascend- 
ing hierarchy the principle of authority and obedience 
is exercised, from the gun bullock to the empress, from 
the private in the ranks to the general-in-chief, from 
the layman at the confessional to the Holy Father 
issuing mandates and pardons from the pontifical 
throne. By a resistless logic, a religion of authority, 
or an empire of authority, forces the human elements 
apart and rearranges them upon this underlying prin- 
ciple of regulation and control. 

You doubtless will recall scattered allusions in the 
Old Testament from the lips of the men who had taken 
in hand the religious tutelage of the people — allusions 
to a remote time when men "did that which was right 
in their own eyes." Now, to a man who has the 
instinct for the government and control of other men, 
it seems somewhat abhorrent that men should be lef* 
to do that which is right in their own eyes. It seems 
like anarchy in politics, and like undue freedom in 
religion. Things must not be left to go that way. 
They must be so ordained that the things which men 



THE SPIRIT WITHIN THE WHEELS 59 

do, both in civil and religious matters, may be directed 
by a superior wisdom and an accredited authority. 

That is precisely what happened to the people of 
Israel in the reign of Josiah, when the remarkable 
book of Deuteronomy was discovered in the temple and 
became the basis of such radical reforms. The deuter- 
onomic code represents a stage in national and religious 
progress when the prophetic group, always earnest 
and intent on raising the spiritual level, and on extir- 
pating idolatry and its accompaniments, believed that 
this would be done only by taking the whole life of 
the people more firmly in hand, and by regulating the 
religious life by breaking down every local shrine and 
centralizing the entire function of religion in the tem- 
ple at Jerusalem. It was a master-stroke. It accom- 
plished great good. But it also set in motion a train 
of influences which in the end wrought much incidental 
evil. For it was the wedge which drove farther and 
farther apart the distinction between church and state, 
between clergy and laity, between sacred and secular, 
between the natural and the supernatural. 

Everywhere and always, the aim of religion has 
been to interpret, either in a theory or in actual experi- 
ence, the relation of God to the world. Even in remote 
times men had some sense of this relationship, and 
they tried to express and interpret it. They "groped 
after God, if haply they might find him." In various 
symbolical ways we find men trying to set forth this 
relationship between God and the world. In the earliest 
forms of religion we find the altar, but frequently — 



60 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

perhaps we might say almost invariably — at this remote 
period the altar, with its sacrifice, expresses not the idea 
of expiation, but the idea of fellowship — the feeling 
that one must somehow share his actual and natural life 
with the Great Power above him. Is it his good for- 
tune to slay a bullock, or a lamb from the flock, in 
order that his family and himself may feast with 
rejoicing? Then his first impulse is to share this good 
fortune with his God. Therefore he offers a portion 
of the meat as a sacrifice on the altar. It is an 
expression of gratitude and of fellowship. Does he 
drink from the fruit of his vineyard, the wine that 
maketh glad the heart of man? Then again must he 
pour out a portion of the wine as an oblation to God, 
in order that God may share these good things, and 
that he may express his own sense of thankfulness to 
the Power which co-operates with him in all his life 
and his toil. There is doubtless some surviving remin- 
iscence of this early expression of religious life in cer ■ 
tain of our own customs, notably those festal occa- 
sions which have come down to us from an antiquity 
too remote to compute. Our Thanksgiving festival is, 
of course, only the continuation of the Harvest festiva 1 
which is as old as man. And even in the year of our 
Lord 1905 we load our tables with good things to eat, 
invite in our friends, and give ourselves up to the 
festival spirit. Even our grim Pilgrim forefathers, 
who instituted the feast in its present form, brought in 
an abundant supply of wild turkeys, feasted at their 
own tables and were doubtless in no condition to attend 



THE SPIRIT WITHIN THE WHEELS 61 

divine service when the meal was over. Yet this very act 
of eating, of enjoying what is eaten, and of consciously 
participating with the giver of all good by an actual 
offering of a portion of the food — all this was itself a 
kind of "religious service" in the earliest expressions of 
religious' life. But in all this there was no special regu- 
lation of the religious life, no ritualizing of it. There 
was no distinction between clergy and laity. Every 
household was a unit, and each father was a priest. 
There was little distinction between natural and super- 
natural, and still less between secular and sacred. 
"Every man did that which was right in his own 
eyes." Religion was the spontaneous and natural 
expression of those emotions which connect human 
life with the dimly understood powers all around it 
and above it, interacting in all the fertility of the 
earth, and in all the labor of human life. If anybody, 
living in primitive days, had possessed the tropical 
imagination of Ezekiel, he might have said, as he 
thought about the divine relation to his own little 
unexplored world, and to his own very crude and sim- 
ple life: "The spirit of the living creature is in the 
wheels. God is in all my life, and the most I can do 
is to give some simple expression to the fact that we 
share this life with him." Indeed, every primitive 
altar is the focus of such expression. If you need an 
indubitable witness to the general human feeling about 
religion and sacrifice in its primitive expression, turn 
back to the book of Genesis and read the statement 
which the compiler of a later time — after the religious 



62 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

and the secular, the natural and the supernatural, had 
been differentiated to a good degree — did not think it 
necessary to omit from the narrative. We read there 
that after the flood, when there was no one on the earth 
but Noah and his family, the patriarch, as his first act 
after disembarking, built an altar, and took of every 
clean beast and fowl, and made an offering on the 
altar; and when the Lord smelled a sweet savor, he 
vowed that he would never again curse the ground for 
man's sake. It was a sacrifice in which man shared 
with his God. The sweet savor of the sacrifice was 
agreeable to both. 

Therefore, let me repeat, in the remote days, when 
every man did that which was right in his own eyes, 
when every household had its father-priest, and every 
altar was the place where man gave material expres- 
sion to his gratitude and his fellowship with the divine 
power, when the great antitheses which control man's 
later life had not consciously arisen, men could say 
implicitly, even though they never dreamed of the 
words: "The spirit of the living creature is in the 
wheels:" the life of God is in man's life, and in all 
the life of the fruitful and joyous earth. 

We come then to the transition point, the hinge 
upon which so much of human history turns. It is a 
point full of significance and interest. The very 
moment that the religious life of man gets organized 
as an independent and formal affair; the moment that 
a class of men comes into existence, whose aim is to 
control and regulate religion, to centralize and formu- 



THE SPIRIT WITHIN THE WHEELS 63 

late it, so that they may keep their hand upon it, there 
begins to fade away this certainty that the spirit of the 
living creature is in the wheels. The spirit disentangles 
itself from the earthly routine. The supernatural is 
something which sits high above the natural. The 
sacred is something which must be enshrined and kept 
apart, and not confused with the outward and secular 
flow. The guarding of the sacred things and the inter- 
pretation of the divine mysteries must be intrusted to 
a special class of men set apart, with authority to 
direct the great body of mankind. Thus the distinction 
between the clergy and the laity becomes a momentous 
event in man's history; and with that distinction the 
age-long struggle begins between the church and the 
state — the interests of the religious life, on the one 
hand, and of the political, civil, and social life of man- 
kind, on the other. 

When those great and good men of King Josiah's 
time set in motion a reform which broke down every 
local shrine, extirpated the old patriarchal religion root 
and branch, concentrated everything in the temple at 
Jerusalem, and gave to religion an official cast, they 
doubtless did not realize that one day a greater prophet 
than themselves would arise, who would find in all this 
officialism a heavy yoke, and who would aim to undo 
the centralizing and regulating tendencies which they 
now set in motion. At a time when religion seemed 
imperiled by crude idolatries, the prophetic guild said : 
"We must set it apart by itself; we must purify and 
exalt it; we must do this in order to save religion." 



64 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

But Jesus began at the opposite end. In order to save 
man from the weight of a religious officialism which 
had become a heavy yoke about his neck, he said : "We 
must decentralize religion and free its spirit. Come 
unto me, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light." 
In the very effort to save religion, the prophets insti- 
tuted a movement which at last made religion an end 
in itself. Man was made for religion, and not religion 
for man. God was not in the world. He was only 
in the temple, mediated through the religious function. 
No longer was the spirit of the living creature in the 
wheels. 

Now, against this background of history we are 
able to see more clearly the meaning of some of the 
significant tendencies of our own day. This ancient 
symbolism comes back to us, to interpret what is going 
on around us everywhere. There are many things 
which cease to puzzle and perplex us the moment we 
get them related to the main drift, the Gulf Stream 
of the large movement of events. 

Let us suppose for a moment that, at the crucial 
point of Hebrew history to which we have referred, 
the prophetic school, aware of the real corruptions 
which had grown up under the ancient and patriarchal 
religion, instead of trying to counteract those evils by 
centralizing religion, and controlling it thus, making 
it a thing by itself, had been able to say: "Religion is 
not a thing by itself. It is a part of the whole life. It 
is the natural, spontaneous, and joyous expression of 



THE SPIRIT WITHIN THE WHEELS 65 

every real experience of life. God is indeed in his 
world. His spirit is in all its activities, in all the fruit- 
fulness of earth, in all the labor of man. These cor- 
ruptions do not grow out of this close identification 
and this familiar fellowship. They grow rather out 
of an inversion of values. Instead of lifting the entire 
life of earth and man up into its higher meaning in the 
life of God, you have brought God down into the 
lower meanings, the unworthier aspects, of the world. 
You have made God really secular. Try now to make 
the world divine." To assume that the prophets might 
have said this is to forget the slow onmoving of 
history. It is to ask too much, even of the highest 
spiritual development of the sixth century before the 
Christian era. 

But this is the very question that is now at last 
asking itself. This is the issue that is pending in the 
world where we live, and in the life of which we are 
participants. The decentralizing of religion is going 
on more rapidly than we are aware. 

Now, does the decentralizing of religion mean its 
decay, its reversion to the condition out of which the 
prophets aimed to save it ? Or does it mean its revivi- 
fication, its release into a wider domain than it has 
ever yet controlled ? 

Doubtless the only answer to this question is that 
it means both things. Every crisis introduces elements 
of peril as well as new possibilities of advance. In the 
breaking-up of authority, in the weakened grasp of 
dying sanctions, many men today are becoming irre- 



66 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

ligious, losing entirely the sense of the meaning and 
place of religion. But the same crisis opens to other 
men vistas of hope and promise such as never have 
been so wide or so fair. 

And it is of this latter possibility that I wish to say 
one further word. Let us interpret to ourselves, if we 
can, the movement which is sweeping us all along in 
its current. 

I read, not long since, some reminiscences from 
Dr. John Watson, better known to us as "Ian 
McLaren," in the course of which he seemed to speak 
with a measure of regret that he was compelled to 
regard himself as a layman who by the force of cir- 
cumstances had been drawn into the ministry of the 
church. He seemed to think that by nature and instinct 
he was a layman rather than a clergyman, and that it 
would have been better for his ministry if he had been 
a real clergyman and not a layman, engaged in the 
work of preaching. Now, what Dr. Watson refers to 
with some timidity and regret is just the thing which, 
it appears to me, we are bound to hail with joy and 
hope. It is precisely one more note which evinces the 
decentralizing of religion. The Christian minister is 
a layman engaged in the work of preaching. He is 
simply a human being set apart to do the work to 
which his aptitudes and ideals call him; set apart, we 
might better say, by reason of those aptitudes and 
ideals. There is no magic in his ordination; no lifting- 
out of the human sphere or of the common work of 
all men ^ no gift of authority to speak or to guide. It 



THE SPIRIT WITHIN THE WHEELS 67 

is simply the dedication to one little branch of the 
common human toil and service. 

It is the correlate of this fact which is of even 
greater significance. For if the minister is nothing 
more than a layman, doing a special branch of the 
common work, then every other person in the world is 
nothing less than a priest, a minister, a divine inter- 
preter in his own chosen field of work. If in the real 
and final sense there is no actual distinction between 
the sacred and the secular, it is not because, official and 
authoritative religion having waned, things have 
slumped back into the slough of the secular, but because 
the ministers and servants of those fields once regarded 
secular have begun to see in their life and their work 
new aspects and mightier potencies of the divine. The 
spirit is once more beginning to move these mighty 
wheels of life. 

Let us then not confound things that are often 
easily confounded. Let us keep a clear head and a 
steady vision as we look out on life. Let us remember 
that the fate of the church as one organized expression 
of religion does not decide the fate of the religious 
spirit itself. The church might totally disappear and 
religion still be alive. Indeed, some aspects and func- 
tions of the church are visibly disappearing. It must lose 
its officialism. It must abandon its monopoly of any 
special territory of life. It must surrender its preroga- 
tive of regulation and control. It must do all this in 
order that it may remain as a center of inspiration and 



68 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

inward leadership. It must die to itself in order that 
it may live. For my own part I have no fear that the 
church will disappear, nor that its higher and vital func- 
tions will perish. But it will be transformed. It is 
being transformed before our eyes. And the day of its 
transformation will be also the day of its victory. 
When it comes clothed with no commission except the 
commission to inspire, to illumine, to clarify the field 
of life, and to help co-ordinate its activities and spheres 
of service, then it will speak with its most command- 
ing and convincing message. 

But, whatever happens to the church as the organ- 
ized expression of religion, the spirit of religion at any 
rate survives. The hour cometh, and long ago was, 
when neither at Jerusalem nor on Mount Gerizim 
man could worship the Father; for He is spirit and 
receives worship in spirit and in truth. The hour 
cometh, and now is, for the reinstitution of the local 
shrine, which the prophets demolished because it had 
become corrupt. But the local shrine must be in the 
heart of each man's life and each man's work. The 
altar must be builded in the home and in the shop, in 
the vineyard and in the field, in the studio of art and 
at the bench of the artisan. Once more, God must be 
made known to us in the breaking of bread. All life, 
all love, all work and service, is a fragment of the 
universal life, and in the consciousness of sharing 
every worthy thing with him we bring our oblations ot 
gratitude — gratitude that we are alive, and that we 
can work and serve. "Ye are all priests unto God." 



THE SPIRIT WITHIN THE WHEELS 69 

Believe that with all your hearts; see clearly what it 
means ; feel the force and the bearing of it in all the 
work you are yourselves doing; and once more these 
wheels that seem to have stopped, this intricate 
machinery of the world which seems to have grown 
still, and of which sometimes you feel moved to say 
with hushed breath, "God is no longer here" — all this 
will begin to revolve. "For the spirit of the living 
creature is in the wheels." 



THE CITY THAT HATH 
FOUNDATIONS 



"He looked for the city which hath the 
foundations, whose builder and maker 
is God."— Hebrews 11:10. 



V 
THE CITY THAT HATH FOUNDATIONS 

There is something profoundly touching in this 
reference to that remote and shadowy figure, coming 
up from the land of the Chaldees to be the founder of 
a nation. Abraham is too dim a personage to be 
grasped securely by the historic sense. He is remote 
and elusive. Yet out of this prehistoric cloudland he 
comes, walking on, to abide in the memory and tra- 
dition of an influential race, and to be cherished in 
their subsequent history as "Father Abraham." He 
comes at last to be almost a mythical personage, just 
as Washington and Lincoln are already envisaged 
through the myth-making atmosphere of the more 
modern time. There is a certain grandeur and dignity 
about the figure thus clothed in poetry and romance. 
And possibly in this atmosphere certain generic and 
essential things are more perfectly discovered than is 
possible in the realistic presence of the individual him- 
self. At any rate, it was a poetic mind, laying hold 
of broad generic. traits, which was able, in a word or 
two, to sketch a figure at once so appealing and so 
heroic. He tells us that this man Abraham dwelt in 
tents all his days, lived the shepherd's life — nomadic, 
unsettled, incomplete; yet out of great, prophetic, far- 
seeing eyes he looked for the city which had the 
foundations, whose builder and maker was God. 

This sketch, drawn with such deftness and pre- 
73 



74 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

cision, becomes a prophetic picture of humanity itself 
— of its hopes, its dreams, its visions, its ideals, and 
its long wandering, through the temporary and unset- 
tled life, toward the permanent and the eternal. It is 
a picture of every man who has caught sight of some- 
thing on before, whose soul is already too great for its 
environment, and who is in his own person the evi- 
dence that "God hath put eternity in the heart 
of men." 

Let us therefore take this portrait -as the prophetic 
picture of man moving on toward his goal, reaching 
out toward the destiny that is ever on before. With 
all its hope and its pathos, its sense of incompletion and 
its vision of the perfect and complete, with its pain 
over present failure and its bounding joy in the pros- 
pect of coming triumph, let us follow it on, as though 
we were reading the story of ourselves. 

Let us at the start note the successive stages in the 
description of this figure of heroic mold, and observe 
how they stand out as human types. There are four 
of these stages on which we shall need to pause: 
First, he went out, not knowing whither he went. 
Second, he dwelt in tents. Third, he might have had 
opportunity to return. Fourth, he looked for the city 
which hath foundations. Whether we apply these 
things to truth looked at as the theory and inner frame- 
work of life, or to truth realized in institutions, laws, 
social customs, and relations, they all describe the 
inherent qualities of the kind of man of whom Abra- 
ham was a type. Let us see if this is not the case. 



THE CITY THAT HATH FOUNDATIONS 75 

"He went out, not knowing whither he went." 
Does any man who really commits himself to the love 
of truth and the pursuit of it, and its continuous appli- 
cation to human need, know whither he is going ? 
Does he know in advance, in detailed and specific 
form, what he is going to hold to be true ten or twenty 
or fifty years hence? He does know that he trusts the 
truth. He believes that life is undergirded with reality 
He is sure that "the everlasting arms are beneath 
him." He sets forth as the traveler sets forth on the 
voyage, folded in by the boundless deep and by the 
sky that closes round on every side, sure that there is 
a port on the other side, and that in due season he wiP 
make the port. 

What ecclesiasticism has often interpreted as faith 
is a certification in advance of all the things that can 
be known. But, to the religious sense, faith has always 
meant the spirit of trust, a confident commitment to 
the world as it is, discovery of truth in the progressive 
experience of life. Faith always goes forth not know- 
ing whither it goes, just to the degree that it has con- 
fidence in the reasonableness and goodness of the 
world, and of the life that moves upon it. 

Perhaps we shall clarify this thought somewhat if 
we look at it for just a moment in the light of one of 
the most suggestive sayings attributed to Christ : "Abra- 
ham saw my day and was glad." Now, those words may 
be interpreted as a piece of supernatural clairvoyance, 
or as a suggestive formula for the entire spiritual evo- 
lution of a race, reading its inner movement and pur- 



76 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

pose in the light of its fulfilment. If one insists upon a 
mechanical inspiration, a sort of puppet figure worked 
by unseen wires upon the stage of history, he may 
allow himself to believe that this man Abraham looked 
steadily forward and saw the end from the beginning, 
beheld the figure of the Christ, and knew from the 
outset that he was the culmination of his own initial 
act and faith. But, were so crude and mechanical a 
theory tenable in thought, it has at least no correspond- 
ing verification in the actual history of the people 
whose long and varied experience is indubitably written 
in the records. Abraham stands there as the initial 
force in a world-wide historic movement which was to 
sweep on and on until it came to a culmination of 
which he could not have dreamed, of which he did not 
have the material for forming even an approximate 
idea. Yet, because he came out of the Chaldean dark- 
ness following the glimmering ray of light which was 
to brighten to the perfect day, because he stands there 
as the father of a great people through whom great 
faiths and hopes were to be born, and because the little 
beam of light he shed was to widen and brighten until 
its diverging rays should fall full and splendid on the 
shining figure of the Son of man, it may be said, in 
the spirit of finest prophecy: "He rejoiced to see 
Christ's day and was glad." 

It is a well-recognized principle that the last step 
in a given series of development explains all the steps 
which lead up to the last. "The real nature of a grow- 
ing thing," Aristotle said long ago, "is to be dis- 



THE CITY THAT HATH FOUNDATIONS 77 

covered only in its matured character." Man is the 
goal, and so the explanation of the long creaturely 
development leading up to man. Explain him, and you 
have explained the forms and types of Hie which pre- 
cede him. The last term is the explanatory term. In 
its light you see light, backward over the path along 
which the procession of life has moved. The genesis 
of anything is explained in the light of its fulfilment 
and goal. You can explain the smaller and more rudi- 
mentary thing by means of the larger and more per- 
fect thing; but you cannot turn the process round 
about. "The whole creation groaneth," Paul said, 
"waiting for the revealing of the sons of God." And 
when the sons of God appeared upon the scene, when 
in due time man actually arrived, this whole groaning, 
unfulfilled, expectant creation might have given as the 
profoundest explanation of itself : "We rejoice to see 
Man's day, and are glad." 

Thus it was that Abraham saw the day of Christ; 
saw it not as a puppet pulled by the wires of a divine 
showman behind the scenes, but saw it as a man walk- 
ing forth with a man's sublime courage, following the 
light, trusting that each step would be an onward one — 
going forth not knowing whither he went. 

And that is the picture of the sublime moments and 
the holy meaning of our human life, and of our cease- 
less quest for the eternal goods. In the big, vital, 
venturesome sense, that is not Faith which sets forth 
with some little Baedecker's guide, seeing just the 
things that are set down in the book, smiling approval 



78 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

at the things smiled on in the successive paragraphs, 
and seeing the world as a party of Cook's tourists sees 
it ; but that is Faith which sets forth with instruments 
of discovery, and with the soul of the explorer, expect- 
ing to find that things in this outlying world will match 
the expectations and the assurances that are in the 
heart. If you go on that kind of a journey, you ma) 
not always stop at the best hotels ; you may perchance 
have at times to eat of a crust and to sleep beneath the 
stars. You will not always find it written down just 
what judgment you are to pass on a painting by 
Raphael, or a fragment of Phidias. But you will learn 
that there are more things in the world than have got 
into the books, and by degrees you will discover that 
there is great joy and satisfaction in making discoveries 
and forming your own judgments, and seeing things 
for yourselves. I have known people who have gone 
through Europe on a bicycle, and who could not, after 
such an experience, be tempted into a personally con- 
ducted tour. I have no doubt there are advantages in 
being personally conducted. There are emergencies 
when it becomes a necessity. But Abraham was not 
personally conducted : "He went forth, not knowing 
whither he went." 

The next thing we read concerning him is that "he 
dwelt in tents all his days." Think of it! This man, 
who had the vision of a city with strong and beautiful 
buildings, resting on immutable foundations; a city 
through whose gates should pour throngs of busy and 



THE CITY THAT HATH FOUNDATIONS 79 

happy people ; a city into which should come the noblest 
products of human industry and skill ; a city where 
there should be co-operation, and the sense of society 
which means more to us all than we know — this man, 
looking for a city, never dwelt in one; saw it only in 
imagination and hope. He lived the unsettled and 
wandering life of a shepherd chief. 

Now, do you see anything in that which corre- 
sponds to the noble but pathetic experience 0/ human 
life? Does it not tell you the story of what the bravest 
and best souls of our human race have found fulfilled 
in their experience time and time again ? Can you not 
look back over the pages of history and read the names 
of those who have dreamed dreams, and seen visions, 
and looked forth with great longing for saner and 
fairer conditions of life; for a better chance and an 
ampler opportunity ; for more liberty, more knowledge, 
more justice, more human good-will and fellowship, 
and who, because they have seen these things and 
greeted them from afar, have made sacrifices, given of 
their strength, their thought, their time — poured out 
their heart's best blood in order that future genera- 
tions might actually possess that which they put their 
arms about and drew to their great hearts as intan- 
gible and elusive dreams? 

"And they died," this writer says at the end of his 
splendid story; "they died, not having obtained the 
promise, because without us they could not be made 
perfect." Ah, my friends, this is the long, pathetic 
story of the sublime human effort. The fathers dwelt 



80 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

in tents in order that the children might dwell in the 
city which they saw and loved. The fathers laid the 
enduring foundations in order that the children might 
go to school and college and start with a better equip- 
ment. The exiled fathers crossed the seas in order 
that coming generations might fare on with freedom 
from oppression and in liberty of body and of soul. 
They saw the city, but they dwelt in tents. 

There is nothing which so stamps life at once with 
sublimity and with pathos as this continuing power 
and willingness to live in the incomplete, while our eyes 
look forward to better and more perfect things; the 
willingness to wander through a temporary and shift- 
ing experience in order that the enduring may come to 
pass. It is a witness to the eternity that is in the heart, 
to the light that burns within us as M a candle of the 
Lord." 

And at this moment there rises up before me the 
figure of one man, 1 honored and beloved among us, 
whose face it may be we shall see no more in mortal 
form, waiting for the death messenger to come. He 
will stand forth in our memory in days to come as one 
of our chief citizens — a man to whom that great, clean, 
word "citizen" in a pre-eminent degree belongs; a man 
who, with the courage of clear vision, has looked for 
a city which has foundations, built on the granite of 
human integrity and honor, and who, in the most literal 
sense as I believe, has laid down his life in order that 
you and your children may live among civic conditions, 

1 Edwin Burritt Smith. Died May 9, 1906. 



THE CITY THAT HATH FOUNDATIONS 81 

of both the material and the immaterial kind, which 
will surpass those we possess today. For himself it 
will be once more the story of Abraham — the life in 
tents, the vision unfulfilled and incomplete. For the 
days and the people to come it will be the city which 
hath foundations — the dream embodied, the hope 
merged into realization. 

But, returning now to this story of Abraham, we 
come upon this statement : "He might have had oppor- 
tunity to return." Yes, he might have gone back to 
Ur of the Chaldees, to the twilight from which he had 
emerged, in the certainty that there was something 
better than Chaldee. Some divine urge within him 
had impelled him forth. "While he mused the fire 
burned," and the candle of the Lord within him began 
to glimmer with a single beam. And he awoke to him- 
self and said : "Oh, it is so dark around me, so dark ! 
I must go forth to find the light which has power to 
kindle this fire and to set this taper aglow. There must 
be a great light shining somewhere. I know not where, 
but I will go forth." 

And he went forth, as did the man in the exquisite 
and prophetic poem of Helen Hunt — the man who 

.... dwelt where level lands lay low and drear 
With dull seas languid tiding up and down, 

and who went forth to find the Singer's hills — those 
purple mountains in the sea — and who, journeying 
toward these magic hills, brought back fruit and flow- 
ers, jewels and costly stuffs, and, staggering with over- 



S2 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

burdened hands, laid down the treasures he had 
brought, while, "smiling, pitying, the world saw 
naught." Like that, this primitive idealist walked 
forth; and he might have had opportunity to return, 
but he did not. 

And how like this is to the varying story of 
human life! We all have opportunity to return, to 
go back, to surrender the vision, to put out the light 
that is within us, and to drift along in the old unheed- 
ing content. 

In his quaint allegory, Bunyan has laid hold of this 
familiar human situation, for he relates that Christian 
and Pliable 

drew near to a very Miry Slough that was in the midst of the 
Plain, and they being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the 
bog. Here therefore they wallowed for a time, being grievously 
bedaubed with the dirt; and Christian because of the burden on 
his back began to sink in the Mire. 

Then said Pliable, "Ah Neighbor Christian, where are you 
now?" 

"Truly," said Christian, "I do not know." 

At that Pliable began to be offended, and angrily said to his 
Fellow, "Is this the happiness you have told me all this while 
of? If we have such ill speed at our first setting out, what may 
we expect 'twixt this and our Journey's end? May I get out 
again with my life, you shall possess the brave country alone 
for me." And with that he gave a desperate struggle or two 
and got out of the Mire on that side of the Slough which was 
next his own House: so away he went, and Christian saw him 
no more. And when he got to his own house again, his Neigh- 
bors came to visit him ; and some of them called him wise Man 
for coming back; and some called him Fool for hazarding him- 
self with Christian; others again did mock at his Cowardliness, 



THE CITY THAT HATH FOUNDATIONS 83 

saying, "Surely since you began to venture I would not have 
been so base to have given out for a few difficulties." So Pliable 
sat sneaking among them. 

Were Bunyan living today, he might not write in 
the form of allegory; his English might not be so 
archaic and quaint; his phrases might not be so 
flavored with the technique of the religious life; but 
he would still find a text in the human alternative that 
was presented to Abraham, and to every man in the 
world : he might have had opportunity to return. He 
would see men setting forth on their life's journey 
with faith in the ideal, with confidence in the power 
of human improvement, and with an eager desire to 
help things on. And he would see some of these men, 
as time went on, growing blind and indifferent, 
cynical about the things that once stirred them with 
enthusiasm, indifferent to the hopes that once made 
their heart's pulses leap. They have had opportunity 
to go back, and they have clambered to the shore near- 
est to the place whence they set out, and they have 
gone back. 

I used to think that the temptations that come to 
youth were the most perilous and insidious of all; 
that once these difficulties could be surmounted the 
battle was won. I have come to see that the tempta- 
tions of youth are not to be compared with the tempta- 
tions of middle life — the perils which overtake one 
when the first glow and ardor of youth have subsided, 
and one is threatened with spiritual stagnation and 
decay. 



84 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

Maeterlinck, our modern allegorist, has written an 
allegory which is called "The Blind ;" and, with a fresh 
interpretation of his own, Mr. Taft is conveying its 
meaning in a piece of sculpture. A group of figures, in 
various stages of senility and decrepitude, are crowd- 
ing, ever crowding, to the fore. And they are all 
blind. Every one of them is groping and has lost his 
way; and terror is on their faces. But one of them, 
in the very forefront, is holding aloft a child. And 
the child is looking out with unterrified and seeing 
eyes. The child is the only one who sees. He is the 
only one who can save them from destruction. 

It is the eternal parable of life: "Except ye have 
the spirit of the child, ye cannot enter the kingdom of 
heaven." Christ saw the same truth long ago. Unless 
you keep the vision and the ideals that are native to 
youth — the ardor, the enthusiasm, the faith; unless, 
having the opportunity to return, you resolutely shut 
your lips and refuse to turn back, then indeed there is 
nothing to keep alive the spirit of hope. And it is the 
spirit of the child, the faith of youth, ever being lifted 
above our senile and decrepit life, on which we must 
still base our confidence and press on. Keep alive the 
child that is in your own heart. Make room for the 
eternal childhood of the race, to be lifted up in our 
midst, where with confident and prophetic eyes he may 
still look forth and lead us on. 

Finally we read concerning Abraham that he 
"looked for the city that hath foundations, whose 



THE CITY THAT HATH FOUNDATIONS 85 

builder and maker is God." He went forth, not know- 
ing whither he was going; but he looked for the city 
with foundations. He dwelt in the changing and 
shifting shelter of the tent all his days; but he looked 
for the city with foundations. He might have turned 
back, but he kept on moving forward, ever looking 
for the city with foundations. 

This is the most inspiring picture we can possibly 
get of our life and the conditions of our human 
experience. Surrounded everywhere by the unknown, 
holding to the great verities, not as demonstrated 
theories, but as the quest and venture of life, we still 
believe in the city with foundations, we hold to the 
absolute and eternal. We are convinced that we shall 
not be put to permanent confusion ; that we are not 
in a world of illusions and deceits, a place where we 
are to be supremely fooled and cheated. 

And though we live in tents; though there is no 
single thing in our life that comes to fruition; though 
misfortune and distress attend us; though our friends 
move on away from the hungry arms that would em- 
brace them and eyes that would look into theirs ; 
though we see our successes turn into defeats, for- 
tunes crumble away into dust, and we grow dizzy with 
the sense of impending change; still we believe in the 
city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker 
is God. 

This puts our trust in the immutable and eternal, 
where it becomes forever serviceable to our need ; 
not in the anathemas of councils, held over us as a 



86 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

threat, but in the still small voice luring us on, as a 
hope; not in rails beneath us, from which we cannot 
swerve except through a misplaced switch, but in the 
pole star in the far-off skies, by which we may guide 
our ship through trackless seas. 

And of the men who sailed that way, 

Some found the purple mountains in the sea, 

Landed, and roamed their treasure countries free, 

And drifted back with brimming laden hands. 

Walking along the lifeless silent sands, 

The Singer, gazing ever seaward, knew, 

Well knew the odors which the soft wind blew 

Of all the fruits and flowers and boughs they bore. 

Standing with hands stretched eager on the shore, 

When they leaped out, he called, "Now God be praised, 

Sweet comrades, were they then not fair?" 



"THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN 
YOU" 



"And being asked by the Pharisees, 
when the kingdom of God cometh, he 
answered them and said, 'The kingdom 
of God cometh not with observation: 
neither shall they say, Lo here! or lo 
there! for lo, the kingdom of God is 
within you.'" — Luke 17:20, 21. 



VI 
'THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU" 

Our first impression, when we turn back to words 
like these, is that we are reading history — and history 
that for the most part is obsolete. We feel our way 
about among unfamiliar ideas, as one might feel his 
way over the stones of the Parthenon, or among the 
ruins of the temple at Jerusalem. And when the task 
is done, with a sense of relief we take up the daily 
paper, or the current magazine — and we know where 
we are. 

Perhaps also, when you get buried in the paper 
with its onrush of contemporary life and its tides of 
reality, you ask yourself the question: "Why did I 
go to church this morning to hear a talk about the 
kingdom of God?" There are, to be sure, a few of 
our neighbors who will not be embarrassed by any such 
question ; for they will not have the disturbing recollec- 
tion of a sermon to interfere with the steady flow of 
contemporary interests. 

But you are here! And in this scant half-hour 1 
wish, if possible, to drive home the nail of one truth. 
And this is the truth which we shall try to drive home 
— that we are here in this place today, and among its 
associations, not primarily to take account of history, 
but to take account of contemporary life and current 
interests. We are here in the interest of the very mat- 
ters of which the daily paper is a chronicle and the 

89 



90 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

magazine an interpreter. If there is any sense of 
mental jolt and break when we pass from today into 
tomorrow, it should be a sign to us that either our 
religious life lacks foreground and action, or our daily 
and secular life lacks background and sky. 

If, therefore, at any time we make an approach to 
our own contemporary interests through the vestibule 
of those interests which were contemporary to another 
age and people, we must stop long enough to ask our- 
selves what men really meant by watchwords which 
are no longer our own watchwords. Two thousand 
years ago "the kingdom of God" was a real and living 
rallying-cry. The words were rooted deep in the soil 
of patriotism and national aspiration. It was an idea 
which had its growth from age to age, but it never lost 
its rooting in the soil of the collective social life. When 
men talked of the kingdom of God, they faced the 
situations which we ourselves are facing when we con- 
template our hopes and fears, the forces which under- 
mine, and the forces which upbuild, our common life 
today. The religious life of men then was simply the 
other side of this national aspiration and these patriotic 
aims. 

When you hold a silver dollar in your hand you 
seldom observe whether you are looking at the eagle 
supporting the religious motto, "In God we trust," or 
at the goddess with the fillet of liberty binding back 
the tresses from her brow. Both sides are dollar sides. 
They are the obverse and reverse of an indissoluble 
unity. So was it with the messianic hope — the expecta- 



"THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU" 91 

tion of the kingdom of God. It was a religion or a 
patriotism, as you pleased. In the temple today you 
might hear the choir of Levites singing, "In God is our 
trust." In the marts tomorrow you might hear men in 
earnest consultation over the prospect of freedom from 
the Roman power. It was all one. The kingdom of God 
was a spiritual state, or a social and political church, 
according as the goddess or the eagle happened to be 
at the top. 

There is a striking counterpart to this situation in 
one of Ibsen's earlier dramatic poems, The Emperot 
and Galilean, the story of which was laid in the reign 
of the Roman emperor Julian, at the time when Chris- 
tianity became the established religion of Rome. In 
consultation with his mystical and oracular adviser, 
Maximos, Julian asks the question: "Will the Gali- 
lean conquer? Is the kingdom from above to destroy 
the kingdom of this earth?" Maximos answers enig- 
matically, as oracles are wont to do : "Neither can 
succeed. Both powers, the earthly and unearthly, shall 
fail. And he shall be the rightful ruler in whom the 
emperor and Galilean shall be joined. There is to 
come the third realm, neither of earth alone, nor yet 
of heaven alone — God-Caesar, Caesar-God — Caesar in 
the kingdom of the spirit, God in the kingdom of the 
flesh." 

Now, this "dark saying" of Maximos is to some 
degree an affirmation of what was already consciously 
in the minds of the people out of whose experience 
came the messianic ideal and the thought of the king- 



92 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

dom of God. They were terms which were current in 
both the religious and the social realm. The one use 
of them reinforced the other. It was to a degree 
already true of them, as someone has declared it will 
be sometime true again, that "the church will be funda- 
mentally the intensification of our civic conscience/' 

Into this messianic atmosphere Christ was born. 
He grew up in it. He accepted it, to begin with, at its 
current value. But he also did much to transform and 
enlarge it. How definitely and literally he took to 
himself the messianic title it may never be quite pos- 
sible to know. But that he should work entirely outside 
of it, that he should ignore and repudiate it, and at the 
same time expect to have any influence or accomplish 
any result in the immediate life of the world around 
him, is quite as unthinkable as that anyone should come 
into our modern world dominated by democratic ideals, 
and hope to have influence except by the use of them. 

But if we may not know just to what degree Jesus 
adopted the prevalent messianic ideal and identified him- 
self with it, we may know some of the ways in which 
he transformed and enlarged it. He said once: "The 
day of the Lord cometh as a thief in the night." Now, 
to people who are in constant dread of burglars, and 
who live in fear of some desperate struggle in the 
night, this may seem to be the prediction of a terrify- 
ing and catastrophic event in the life of man, and the 
history of the world — something which will awake 
everyone as with a shock of alarm. But, as matter of 
fact, I suppose the thief in the night came in ancient 



'THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU" 93 

times as lie is quite likely to come in modern times — 
suddenly, but silently. He has come and gone, and you 
know it in the morning only by something that has 
taken place. And that is how the kingdom of God 
would come, Jesus said — the great social and human 
transformations : suddenly and silently, but not with 
terrifying clash or with rude awakening. It would 
glide in unobserved, just because it was so intimately 
a part of the order of events. It would have come 
and would be present before men had really compre- 
hended that anything had taken place. 

And that is what he must have meant in these more 
deliberate words. When the Pharisees asked him when 
the kingdom of God should come, he said: "The 
kingdom of God cometh not with observation at all ; 
not in outward show or by anxious watching for its 
advent. Nor is it confined to this or that particular 
event or circumstance, to something that stands out as 
definite and unusual, so that you may say, 'Here it is,' 
or There.' " 

There were two influential tendencies in the time 
of Christ — the same two that one finds everywhere. 
There was one class of people who believed the king- 
dom of God would come only by righting for it. They 
wanted a revolution. They had in them the fire of 
the old Maccabean days. The Zealots were of this way 
of thinking. Barabbas and the two men who were 
crucified with Christ were very likely men of this 
insurrectionist type. Judas Iscariot had the revolu- 
tionary spirit, and he was bitterly disappointed that 



94 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

Jesus did not turn out to be a revolutionary leader, 
organizing the discontent and unrest of the people into 
a formidable force of opposition. Jesus doubtless hart 
the revolutionists in mind when he said : "The king- 
dom of God cometh not with observation. You can- 
not say, 'Lo here it is' or 'There.' It is amongst you. 
It is within you." 

There was another circle of men who looked for 
the kingdom of God to come, not by revolution, but 
by revelation. They expected some sign from heaven. 
They looked for a miracle. There would be some 
catastrophe in the natural world, and God would come 
in and take possession of things, and his reign would 
actually begin. Therefore Jesus doubtless had in mind 
the men who looked for a miracle, as well as the men 
who wanted a revolution, when he said : "The king- 
dom of God does not come by observation, by watch- 
ing for it, by identifying it with this or that strange 
occurrence. It is hidden in the course of things. It 
grows up in its own silent and unobtrusive way, 
because it is a part of life, it is in the order of the 
world. It is amongst you, and within you." 

In a word, Jesus did not look for the kingdom of 
God to come through militant revolution, with Judas 
and the Zealots; nor by miraculous revelation, with 
the scribes and the rabbis ; but by quiet, steady, invis- 
ible evolution. The kingdom of God was the unfolding 
order of the world. It was the unfolding growth of 
the human spirit. It was the response of the one to the 
other. It was seeing light in the light — seeing more 



'THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU" 95 

light as the eyes grew stronger and the light grew 
clearer. 

Now, it is this enlargement and transformation of 
the current thought of the kingdom of God which fixes 
our attention as we follow Jesus through his experi- 
ence and his teaching. The fundamental and reigning 
idea he held in common with the men of his time. He 
attached himself to it. He identified himself with it. 
But he did not look for it to come at the edge of the 
sword, nor upon the flash of a miracle. Neither by 
the force of man nor by the force of God was it to 
come, but by the sure and silent force of growth — the 
power inherent in all living things and in all living 
ideas. 

And it is just this way of regarding the great con- 
temporary enthusiasm of Jesus' own time which makes 
the whole thing so much a contemporary matter of our 
own time. We ought to be able to understand Jesus, 
as the people of his own time could not understand 
him. For it is precisely his idea of growth, this silent, 
world-wide principle of growth, which has everywhere 
been steadily displacing the reliance upon revolution 
and the reliance upon miracle — those two chief exhibi- 
tions of outward force. 

There are, to be sure, still left a sufficient number 
of both these types to keep them in evidence. There 
are people who believe that the day of the Lord will 
come when there are enough people of one mind 
banded together to put the other people down and out, 
to build barriers against them and to make laws against 



96 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

them; to put them out of the way by power of the 
statute, or by power of an even more aggressive and 
militant force. And there are people who still believe 
that the day of the Lord will come at some definite 
time in the future. In a kind of awesome and super- 
stitious way, they look on all the unusual happenings in 
the world of nature, and all the discouraging con- 
ditions in the world of society, and they say: "These 
are signs of his coming. When things get a little 
worse, then God will surely come, and his coming will 
be a day of judgment and burning." 

But it becomes more and more possible, and more 
and more natural, to penetrate, with understanding, the 
thought of Christ, that the kingdom of God — that is, 
the meaning and purpose of God, his way with the 
world, and his thought for human life — comes not 
with observation, as something which may be located 
and labeled in specific events, or brought about by 
specific efforts, but as something rather which is con- 
tinually coming to expression, and gaining in value and 
in triumph as time moves on. It matters very little 
whether we .express our thought and hope through the 
ancient symbol. "The kingdom of God" — as a form 
of words — we may easily let go, just as we have let 
go most of the messianic phraseology. But it is the 
inner kernel of the thought which we wish to keep, 
which shall itself become a seed to spring up into new 
leafage and fruit. What we wish to keep alive is the 
abiding sense of the 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU" 97 

One God, one law, one element, 

And one far-off divine event, 

To which the whole creation moves. 

And there is one very evident reason why it is 
possible for us to keep alive this idea, and to enter with 
deeper appreciation into Christ's enlargement of the 
reigning religious ideas of his own time. That reason 
is found in the fact that we are everywhere getting 
renewed emphasis of the truth that we live in a world 
which is one world throughout — a world in which 
there is no place any longer for the antitheses and 
divisions which men have been accustomed to make. 

How queer it seems, even yet, to wake up sud- 
denly and realize that we live in a world without a 
firmament, either of the literal or of the metaphorical 
kind. There is no adamatine layer between our 
world here and some other world up there. Someone 
has said that it is not at all the "higher critics," or 
any men or influences of our own time, that have 
created the disturbances of one kind and another 
of which we are aware in our religious life. It 
is a man who lived a long time ago who created 
these disturbances — a man by the name of Coper- 
nicus. For it is certainly a fact that when the Ptole- 
maic idea of the world gave way to the Copernican 
idea, all these various shelves and layers, these mem- 
branes and middle walls of partition which had 
divided the world up into compartments and strata, 
gradually disappeared. 

YVe do not vet fullv realize how much it means to 



98 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

have all these things pulled out, and the world left 
homogeneous and unified — one vital and organic 
whole throughout. In our houses, with their various 
rooms and partitions, we say, "This is up-stairs, and 
that is down-stairs. The piano is in the east room, 
the library is in the west room." But suppose we take 
out the floors and the partitions, and remove the 
stairs. Even if we go on using the old terms, as 
doubtless we might for a time, they have lost their 
relevancy. East room and west room, chambers and 
parlors, are one undivided and spacious hall. 

Precisely this is what has happened to the universe. 
The staircase and partitions and floors have been 
removed. The firmament has been pulled out. And 
what a lot of terms and ideas become obsolete the 
moment you pull out the firmament — that hard, divid- 
ing partition between, below, and above! Men once, 
with the geography and cosmic ideas familiar to 
them, could speak of the supramundane and the super- 
natural, because there was a hard and fast division 
line to which something could be "super." But how 
can the man who accepts the astronomy of Coper- 
nicus accept also the religious ideas which reflected the 
world before Copernicus? How can he hold that any- 
thing is strictly supernatural, when he has pulled out 
the firmament which alone made that thing "super" 
to the natural world ? He can say it only in the sense 
in which he says "up-stairs" after the staircase and 
floors have been removed. 

As matter of fact, we do still go on saying "up- 



"THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU" 99 

stairs" and "in the other room." We still think of 
God as being in some place ; of heaven as having some 
location in space and time; of some days and places 
and acts as being sacred ; some laws as being natural 
laws, and other laws supernatural and divine. These 
are the surviving habits of thought and expression 
which disappear as slowly as the rudimentary organs 
which no longer have function, and sometimes create 
a deal of trouble. There is a process of surgery going 
on all the time for this trouble, which might be named 
ecclesiasticitis, which eliminates those terms and ideas 
that grew up when we believed ourselves to live in a 
double world, and all the partitions and firmaments 
were fast in place. 

Were there time, I should like to speak of these 
rudimentary survivals at length. Let me hurriedly 
mention one or two. Take the case of the never- 
ending question about the teaching of religion in the 
public schools. How full the controversy of little ele- 
ments and situations which have absolutely no signifi- 
cance in our modern world ! Some young people came 
to me a few weeks ago to ask permission to use this 
church for the midyear graduation. The permission 
had hardly been granted when they called to say that 
the request must be withdrawn. It was not per- 
missible to use a church for a public-school occasion. 
Now see what this signifies. On the one hand there 
is a group of people who fear that the public schools 
will come under the control of religion; and on the 
other hand there is a group who condemn them 

i. ore. 



ioo THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

already because they are secular and godless, and who 
demand the parochial school in their place. The firm- 
ament and the partition and the staircases are all there 
in the minds of both those groups of objectors. 
Religion is something definite and localizable, some- 
thing that you can lock out or let in at will. 

When I think of the heat and bitterness that have 
gone into this controversy, I think I understand better 
the words of the Scripture: "He that sitteth in the 
heavens shall laugh." But out of that divine laughter 
has gone all mockery and derision. It is the laughter 
of one who comprehends, who sees the infinite humor 
under all our petty human strife and trouble. 

If one had ever caught even the faint echo of the 
divine indwelling, sounded in the Hebrew psalm, "If 
I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the utter- 
most parts of the sea, even there shall Thy hand lead 
me and Thy right hand shall hold me," he would under- 
stand that God could not be kept om of his world, 
because there is no way of putting him out, no outside 
into which to put him; and that religion could not be 
put out of, or into, the public schools by any decree of 
church or state, because religion is a spirit of life, 
which just as inevitably expresses itself as the sun 
shines or the air fills all space. Romanist and secu- 
larist are both in error. The children will get in con- 
tact with religion, if it is in the teacher's life as the 
spirit of reverence and trust, and of large confidence in 
the divine meaning of life. I do not need to have a 
teacher teach my child the Bible, if his spirit is attuned 



"THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU" 101 

to the abiding and eternal forces in the world; and if 
it is not — he could not teach it if he tried. 

Then we find another of these rudimentary sur- 
vivals in our rather confused and contradictory atti- 
tude toward the observance of Sunday, for instance. 
When the partitions are all in place and the firmament 
slid in, it is easy enough to determine the use of sacred 
days and places, because there are certain things which 
belong there on the upper side of the partition, and 
certain other things which belong on this side; and 
the two need not be mixed. There are definite acts 
and moods and occupations for the sabbath, the sacred 
day, and certain other acts and occupations permis- 
sible on all other days. 

But what is going to be done when you can no 
longer keep the firmament and partition in their 
ancient place? Well, most men know not what to 
do. Some say: "All times and places are becoming 
profane and secular." So in desperation they try to 
push the firmament back, and make the old distinction 
between sacred and secular survive a little longer. 
But you feel like saying to them, as Paul said to the 
Galatians : "I am afraid of you, lest by any means I 
have bestowed labor upon you in vain, for ye observe 
days and months and seasons." Then there are others 
who seem to be aware that all things have become 
secular, that the ancient restraints are loosened ; and 
they are glad to have it so. If they are already com- 
pelling men to render service for six long days, they 



102 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

gladly seize upon the opportunity to levy service for 
one day more. They would wring labor for twenty - 
five hours out of the twenty-four, if the law permitted 
and they could bribe the Time-keeper of the world. 
To such people you feel constrained to say: "I am 
afraid of you, because in abandoning the observance 
of days and seasons you have abandoned the only 
thing which ever gave that observance human worth 
— the need, namely, of getting vision, and perspective, 
and largeness of life." 

And it is only through some such insight into the 
heart of that which lay behind the ancient use of days 
and seasons, with its untrue distinction between the 
sacred and the secular, that we can ever come to a 
sane and worthy relation to our present world, out 
of which the disappearance of the superficial error has 
often carried, for the time being, the deeper and abid- 
ing truth. One can never get the true relation to life 
by asking himself the question : "What is permissible to 
do, or not to do, on the sabbath?" Or, "Shall we let 
other men do this or that ?" He can get that relation 
only by asking himself the question: "Am I finding 
in this world, as I move through it, the meaning of 
that world and of my life? Am I coming into living 
and filial contact with those forces of the world which 
shall give me growth, free me from narrow ends, and 
unfraternal ways? Have I found the secret of truth 
and the secret of love? Am I opening every door in 
my life which faces the sun, and the clear sky, and 
the face of the infinite Life?" 



"THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU" 103 

It is such questions that we come asking in our 
day, which in some ways is so different from the day 
and the world in which men lived when they came to 
Christ with their question: ''When shall the kingdom 
of God come?" To them it was to come out of some 
place, in some definite time, and with visible lordly 
approach and command. It was an order of things as 
definite as that in which they lived, and which was to 
displace it and continue forever. 

Jesus, anticipating the world which has become 
one, the world from which all walls of partition have 
been taken, spoke the prophetic words : "The king- 
dom of God cometh not by watching for it, or by 
locating it in the world of place and events. It comes 
as the light cometh, and as the seed groweth, and as 
the child climbs up to the stature of the man. It comes 
because it is already here. It appears as an outward 
reality, because first it is an inward necessity and 
fact." 

And I am confident that sometime, when we have 
reorganized all the vital interests of our world of 
today into a new religious unity; when the last rudi- 
mentary survival of a dualistic world shall have 
ceased to trouble us; when we shall have clearly seen 
that the things we are working for in our science, and 
our political life, and our social relations, and our secu- 
lar affairs, are all varying aspects of one eternal unity 
and fact, we shall then gather them up and approach 
them with the enthusiasm and the zeal with which 



104 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

men hovered over that ancient question : "When shall 
the kingdom of God come ?" 

We are not living up to the height of our capacity 
unless we are concerned in the equivalent of that 
question. We are not loyal to our birthright if we 
willingly live the divided life — if it goes on piece- 
meal and unrelated and uninspired. What does my 
life mean to God? What does it contribute to the 
far-off divine event? 

The answer to these questions is never to be found 
across the seas, or in the heavens above. It is in our 
mouth, and our heart, that we may do it. 



OUT OF THE HEART ARE THE 
ISSUES OF LIFE 



"Keep thy heart with all diligence, for 
out of it are the issues of life." — 
Prov. 4:23. 



VII 

OUT OF THE HEART ARE THE ISSUES OF 

LIFE 

This text is an old proverb which, in our time, 
comes back to us with fresh force and value. It accords 
substantially with the prevailing psychology of today. 
There has been a long era of exaggerated intellectual- 
ism, during which the mind, as the organ of reason- 
ing and reflection, has been given a value which does 
not properly belong to it. The necessity for clear 
thought, for sound reasoning and correct and saga- 
cious judgment, is so great that it is not surprising 
that they should at times usurp the throne. Knowl- 
edge means so much, and ignorance is such a fatal 
lack, and so great a handicap, that it is easily for- 
gotten that, after every claim for knowledge has been 
registered and appraised, it never has, and can never 
actually acquire, the primacy. The controlling forces 
of life are deep down in the region of the master- 
passions, the dominant desires, the racial instincts and 
impulses — often, indeed, below the threshold of con- 
scious intelligence. It is the engine and steam in the 
heart of the ship that make the ship go. The pilot, 
with his hand on the helm, holds the ship to the favor- 
ing course, avoiding rocks and shoals, and collisions 
with other ships. Up there in his conspicuous place, 
overlooking the sea, chart and compass within reach, 
the pilot may call for more steam, for full-head or 

107 



108 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

back-water; but he cannot actually make the ship 
go. The power is down there in the hold. Out of 
the heart of the ship come the controlling forces, and 
out of the heart of man come the issues of life. 

This is familiar ground. It is becoming even more 
familiar in the new phrases and terms of today. Buc 
it is interesting to note that many of these men of old 
time, who thought deeply and adequately upon the 
ways of the spirit, realized that the fundamental cod 
trol of life was in the heart — by which they meant the 
whole nature of man, all that he is with his inherited 
instincts, his racial impulses, his own master-motives 
and dominant desires. "As he thinketh in his heart, 
so is he." These men never made the mistake of 
assuming religion to be something that can be taught, 
a precept to be learned, a creed to be repeated, or even 
an authority to be accepted and obeyed. These ideai, 
have supervened in due time, in the promotion of the 
religious life, but religion itself is there already. It is 
one of the controlling impulses of life, one of the 
master-passions of the heart out of which come the 
issues and the destiny of life. 

We have here, then, our guiding clue today, and 
we will take our bearings as we move along. 

First of all, let us repeat : It is not the mind, the 
thought-power, the judgment-forming part of our 
nature, which holds the primacy and sits upon the 
throne. The mind, with its thoughts, its judgments, 
its ideas, is the servant of our practical needs. The 



THE ISSUES OF LIFE 109 

mind, in fact, came into being, was organized and 
developed, because of our practical needs. It is not 
the regal and aristocratic member of our being that it 
has sometimes been assumed to be. It is a veritable 
slave and lackey, serving in homespun, continually 
driven, and made to work overtime at the whip's end 
of the dominant forces of life. Because primitive 
man was conscious of hunger, he contrived a way to 
till the ground, to plant, to reap, to grind and bake. 
The mind did not invent bread, and then coax the 
appetite to eat because bread forsooth was good. Man 
was hungry, the appetite was imperious master, and 
it compelled the mind to find some way of satisfying 
that need. Because man was naked, also, he invented 
dress, first from the skins of wild beasts, then from 
their woolly covering, woven into a fabric. Because 
he was subjected to the wind and the rain, to the sun 
and the frost, he drove the thinking part of him to 
devise a tent and a roof, a protecting shelter from the 
prowling lion, or a stockade against human foe. Here 
is the invariable order: need — invention — satisfaction. 
And this is actually all that the mind, with its knowl- 
edge, has ever done for man ; in the last analysis it 
will always reduce to this — the discovery of a way, 
continuously a better way, between these two terms : 
need and the satisfaction of the need. Out of the 
heart have been the issues of life from the outset. 
The needs, the desires, the great passions, the urgent 
impulses — these have been in control. It is they who 
have sat on the throne. 



no THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

Let us move on a step to a second thought. Let 
us note now how many of these habitual ways of 
doing things, in bridging over from the need to its 
satisfaction, have become fixed in permanent instincts 
which are handed down in the life of the race. The 
mind, this servant in homespun, channels out a canal 
and drags these heavy-laden barges of desire and 
need, these many kinds of hunger and thirst, one after 
another through the canal. 

It is possible to study this working of instinct in 
many of the animals. The beaver builds its dam with 
the same precision and completeness with which 
beavers built their dams centuries ago. The bee con- 
structs its cell with the same mathematical perfection 
and beauty. The kitten, playing with its first mouse, 
displays all the graceful finesse, the teasing 
strategy, which cats have shown since the first cat 
caught its first mouse. Everyone has watched a kit- 
ten in its first experience as captor. There is a 
moment of surprise and bewilderment — as though to 
say, ''What now?" And then the full force of gen- 
erations of feline skill leaps into activity. Instinct 
has declared itself. That act will never be done any 
better than it was done the first time. In the power 
of instinct the inventive nature has come to a kind of 
stationary completion, and it is easy enough to trace 
the path once more from need to its satisfaction. 
When your kitten encountered its first mouse it was 
quite probably not hungry at the time. It may have 
been aroused from a comfortable nap to be presented 



THE ISSUES OF LIFE in 

with one caught in the trap. But, on the other hand, 
the kitten does not reason : "This is mouse ; mice are 
good for cats; therefore eat." The cat pounces on 
the mouse because generations ago some other cat, that 
was hungry, pounced on one, and found satisfaction 
of hunger. The hunger is primary in the race, even 
when it is not in each successive individual of the race. 
All our ways of doing things, our laws and customs 
and habits — all "the issues of life" — originate in the 
heart, down among the master-passions and desires. 

The human instincts are similar in nature, and 
work with like purpose and tenacity. We are begin- 
ning only tardily to learn that the characteristic traits 
and differences among the various races and peoples 
are these differences of inherited instincts, and that it 
is impossible suddenly to change the working of these 
instincts by any formula, or maxim, or precept which 
has grown up as a superior way of doing things else- 
where. Down below the instinctive act or way of life 
is some remote ancestral custom rooted in a primary 
human need, and that remote process has become 
automatic in the race. A thousand picturesque and 
peculiar things which we see in the foreign races that 
come to our shores are these racial habits which indi- 
cate the many ways the various people of the world 
have found for bridging over from the primary 
demands of life to their satisfaction and fulfilment. 
It is a part of the tragedy of this remaking of peo- 
ples, adapting them to different and perhaps better 
civilizations, that the younger generations growing up 



112 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

in new surroundings, easily imitating and adopting the 
customs into which they come, grow at length into a 
feeling of alienation from the older members of the 
race who migrated with them. It is an impressive 
enforcement of the fact that the issues of 'life, the con- 
trolling forces of destiny, are down in the heart, in 
the practical needs of life out of which the guiding 
impulses are born. 

We are ready, then, to take a third step. If it be 
true that many of the human ways of doing things 
to satisfy the claims and the hungers of life become 
automatic and unchangeable, it is also true that human 
life offers the widest field of improvability and 
enlargement. Man's mind widens, and his knowledge 
grows, because his needs increase, or, rather, because 
he becomes conscious of more needs, which keep well- 
ing up out of the great deep of his nature. Let us 
put side by side in our thought the first house and the 
last house man has built. The first house : a stick in 
the ground, a beast's skin arranged about it — and 
there is the savage wigwam, affording some shelter 
from the sun and storm, some protection from foes, 
a place to sleep and to live. That is the first issue of 
the house-type which came up out of the heart's 
demand for shelter. The last house: it has walls, 
roof, door — the essential things which the primitive 
hut had ; but it has many things which the hut had 
not. It has a system of heating and ventilation, 
because man lives in a different climate and under 



THE ISSUES OF LIFE 113 

severer conditions. It has a system of plumbing and 
drainage, because there is the modern need of sanita- 
tion, of protection against disease; for man lives in 
crowded cities. Its walls have taken on quiet 
and harmonious tones. In its rooms are placed 
works of art, books, souvenirs of friendship or of 
travel. Draperies, rugs, chairs, tables, furnishings — 
all must harmonize and help to make up this poem 
which you call your house. And to what end? In 
order that you may get in out of the cold and the 
wet? Yes, that primarily. But into this primitive 
impulse and stimulus have played a hundred others 
which have grown up with the growth of man. Yet 
every addition has been made in response to some 
new desire which has become active and controlling, 
and has taken its place as the stimulus of some new 
need. Through the entire process the mind con- 
tinues to be the servant of man, toiling in homespun 
and working overtime, in order to interpret and sat- 
isfy these wants, desires, and feelings as they arise 
out of the great deep of life. Out of the heart are 
the issues of life from beginning to end. 

One further step, and we shall be ready to face 
about, and look over the field which it is our particu- 
lar aim to get into range. Let us recapitulate: We 
have seen, in the first place, that the mind with its 
knowledge and invention is the servant of our practi- 
cal needs, building bridges between desires and their 
satisfaction. We have noted, in the second place, that, 



114 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

within certain limits, this process gets fixed in per- 
manent and automatic instincts, a given thing always 
being done in the same way, because the conscious 
need remains stationary and unchanging. We have 
observed, in the third place, that of all the forms of 
life in the world, man is most susceptible to change 
and improvement; that he becomes aware of increas- 
ing needs, and therefore invents new and more effective 
ways of meeting those needs. 

In the fourth place, then, let us stop a moment to 
note that the process of education is precisely the 
process of making connection between our human 
needs in all their expanding form and the satisfaction 
of those needs. It is finding the way to live effect- 
ively and fruitfully in the world in which we live. 
Education consists partly in the training of the mind, 
and the acquisition of the stores of knowledge and 
experience which the world has garnered; but this 
only as preliminary to a larger, more fruitful and 
inventive use of the mind in serving our practical 
needs. Can there be any notion of education more 
arid or sterile than the conception of it as a discipline 
of the mind, or an acquisition of knowledge, if we 
stop with either or both of these ideas? Discipline 
of mind and possession of knowledge have little sig- 
nificance except in relation to the service of our prac- 
tical and ever-present human situation, constructing 
bridges from desire to satisfaction. The mind, like 
the Pope, may indeed be the Pontifex Maximus, but 
in neither case by merely occupying a pontifical 



THE ISSUES OF LIFE 115 

throne must either exercise the function which the 
term implies — that of being the master bridge-builder. 
So far as education makes a man think of his train- 
ing and culture in that light, it has served its end, no 
matter what the special process and technique may 
have been. So far as it does not make that con- 
nection and serve some real end, it deserves to be 
called education as little as the polishing of a brass 
lamp deserves to be called shedding light. The peasant 
woman at her loom, the good grandmother at her knit- 
ting by the fire-place, the artisan at his bench, are 
better educated than any boy or girl in possession of 
the richest culture the schools afford, if at the end he 
has come to despise any honorable task of life, or to 
lose the sense of connection between human need, and 
the larger and better satisfaction of that need. 

Tis life whereof our nerves are scant, 
More life and fuller that we want. 

And the demand constantly being made upon our 
human training and culture is to find completer and 
more satisfying ways to meet the endless and inexor- 
able demands of the spirit. An education that stops 
in the head is really little better than a cold in the 
head. It is congestion in the wrong place. Culture, 
like the circulation, needs distribution and outlet. 

"An axiom is not an axiom," someone has said, 
"until it is felt in the pulses." Education, whether it 
be manual or mental, technical or general, scientific, 
literary, or philosophical, justifies itself only as a part 
of that ceaseless demand for fulness of life, for a 



Il6 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

more adequate satisfaction of the boundless issues of 
life which keep welling up out of the heart. 

Education has frequently been interpreted as a 
boy in the neighborhood, belonging to the public 
schools, interpreted what was going on at the Univer 
sity School of Education. The class in geography 
was at work out of doors, constructing hills, mount- 
ains, valleys, rivers, and sp forth. This boy and his 
companions watched the process with interest for a 
time, and then, turning away with a contemptuous 
expression, he remarked : "Humph ! That's the way 
they study geography over here at the university. 
Over at our school we study geography with our 
minds." "Liberal education" — that shibboleth which 
has come down the ages — implies an education for the 
liberus, the freeman, the man of leisure, who is 
released from the necessity for toil. But liberal edu- 
cation which shall be the shibboleth of the future must 
be an education which liberates, freeing every human 
power for fuller expression and a more perfect 
activity. It must be a better bridge-builder between 
need and the satisfaction of the need. 

Finally, let us face about and look back over the 
way we have come, and see the bearing of the whole 
thought upon the great fact and reality of the reli- 
gious life. If all the other issues of life are practical 
issues, religion is a practical issue likewise. If these 
other things are master-passions and needs of the 
actual life of man, religion takes its place with them as 



THE ISSUES OF LIFE 117 

a master-passion, a fact which lies down in the deep 
places, calling for no other justification or apology 
than that it is such a fact, one of the ceaseless issues 
of life. To apologize for the religious instinct is to 
insult it. It calls for the apologetic attitude no more 
than birth, or love, or patriotism. It is generic, and 
racial, and resistless, like all these other things. 

The most fatal assumption men have ever made 
regarding religion is that it is a revelation,' in the 
sense of being a kind of information and knowledge 
and detail of fact handed over to man through some 
authentic channel, just as John Alexander Dowie 
might be supposed to receive and authenticate and 
proclaim a revelation. Religion wells up out of the 
deep. It is in the very movement and structure of 
life itself. It is real even in its gropings. It is no 
more real, only more satisfying, in its later and wiser 
stages. In the fundamental sense the knowledge of 
God is not a true understanding of what God is in his 
nature. It is, rather, a vital and personal connection 
with the divine movement and activity, and the sense 
of satisfaction, of harmony, of inner music which 
that connection assures. If we could once anchor our- 
selves to this underlying reality as to the religious life 
and the welfare of the spirit, we should live with 
entire confidence and serenity regarding all the trans- 
formations that go on as to our knowledge, and our 
interpretation of these realities in terms of thought. 

It is often claimed and declared that the very sus- 
picion of change in matters of religious opinion or 



Il8 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

belief is as grave a charge as can be brought. But 
surely school keeps even when the school board 
decrees a change of geographies and arithmetics for 
the pupils. And it is to be assumed that such changes 
do not in every instance imply that a rival publisher 
now has his innings and a chance to sell his books. 
It is to be hoped and assumed that progress is being 
made in the construction of textbooks. But school 
keeps all the time. In like manner the church keeps, 
religion goes on; men are able to live with reverence 
and trust, with Godly fear, and devotion to the unseen 
issues of life, even in times when religious opinions 
are undergoing change, when - the geography and 
arithmetic of religion are being stated anew. Let us 
not confound the reality of the religious life with the 
knowledge and interpretation of what that reality is. 
Let us not suppose that a knowledge of God neces- 
sarily means a complete and adequate idea of what 
God is. Let us hold to the biblical idea of the knowl- 
edge of God, viz., personal accord with a supreme and 
hidden purpose which compels the admiration and 
devotion of the heart. "He that loveth knoweth God, 
for God is love." To know by means of love is to 
know through the faculty of reverence, of service, of 
loyalty. There is an eternal truth in that quaint sym- 
bolism of the Old Testament. Moses wished to see 
God, and God said : "Thou shalt not see my face, but 
thou shalt behold me as I pass by." And from the 
cleft in the rock Moses beheld God as his garments 
swept past. Men have never looked upon the face of 



THE ISSUES OF LIFE 119 

God. He is, as the Bible says, "a God of silence." 
Generation after generation has lived upon the earth, 
and this strange silence is unbroken. With Job we 
say: "Behold I go forward, but he is not there; and 
backward, but I cannot perceive him. On the left 
hand, when he doth work, but I cannot behold him. 
He hideth himself on the right hand that I cannot 
see him." We have not seen his face. We have not 
heard his voice. But we have seen him as he passes 
by — in the phenomena of the world, in the movement 
of life itself, in the needs and hunger of our being, in 
our capacity for love, in our desire to find the truth, 
in our power to take a moral outlook and to grow 
in spiritual stature. All these are tokens that he is 
with us, that "he knows the way that we take, and 
that when he has tried us we shall come forth as 
gold." 

Let us be thankful for all the knowledge we get, 
for all the light that shines upon our path, for every- 
thing that organizes itself into the certainty of truth 
for the mind ; above all, for those personal disclosures 
of the divine thought and will which come to us in 
specially endowed souls — most radiant of all in the 
transparent character, the single-mindedness, the 
divine sonship of Jesus Christ. But back of all these 
things, before them in time, imbedded in the far-off 
origin of life itself, is the impulse and the guarantee 
of the religious life. Out of the heart are its issues. 
In the need of the heart is the abiding certainty of its 
continued power. 



120 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

And who can tell us what new resurgence of the 
religious life shall well up out of this great deep of 
our human hunger for the eternal reality? In truth 
did Jesus say: "If any man*will drink of the water 
that I shall give him, it shall be in him a well of water 
springing up into eternal life." We know little of the 
capacity of that fountain which is within us. We only 
know that its waters will not gush for every idler who 
stands at the fountain and demands that the water 
flow. It must be some Moses who shall strike the 
rock and make the waters leap forth. Great souls, 
born in due time, incarnating in themselves the 
thoughts, the feelings, the convictions which a genera- 
tion or an age has undergone, are able at last to speak 
the word; and, behold, God laveth the thirsty land 
with the new tokens of his presence. The river 
that floweth from the throne of God leaps and 
sparkles and moves on with resistless current to the 
sea. 

Some such day will surely come to us all again. 
Some great soul will one day interpret, as no living 
man now seems able to do, the meaning of these pent- 
up forces of the heart. We can afford to wait in 
patience for that day, and to labor for its coming in 
sobriety of judgment, not being drawn hither and 
thither by those who say, "Lo, here it is," or "Lo, 
there." 

We shall know the great prophet, when he comes, 
by the new stirring of the great deep out of which 
have always come the great and enduring issues of life. 



THE ISSUES OF LIFE 121 

Thou shalt know him when he comes, 

Not by any din of drums, 

Nor the vantage of his airs, 

Neither by his crown, 

Nor his gown, 

Nor by anything he wears. 

He shall only well known be 

By the holy harmony 

That his coming makes in thee. 



THE SACRAMENTAL VALUE OF 
MATERIAL THINGS 



"Take, eat, this is my body." — Matthew 
26:26. 



VIII 

THE SACRAMENTAL VALUE OF MATERIAL 
THINGS 

"The Holy Communion," the "Eucharist," the 
"Lord's Supper," are the more familiar names under 
which has been perpetuated the memory of the last 
Passover which Jesus kept with his companions before 
his crucifixion. To write the history of this memorial 
would be to write a large part of the history of the 
Christian church. To state the various interpreta- 
tions which have been given its character and its 
efficacy would be also to parallel, to a good degree, 
man's interpretation of the world in which he lives, 
the divine relation to it, and the interrelation of the 
divine and the human. 

The Holy Communion has been widely held to be 
a sacrament — one of the seven sacraments of the 
Roman church, one of the two sacraments of the 
Protestant church. And a sacrament has commonly 
been defined as the "outward and visible sign of 
inward and spiritual grace." Jeremy Taylor some- 
where says that "the Fathers, by an elegant expres- 
sion, call the blessed sacraments the extension of the 
incarnation." In the course of time, and as an inevi- 
table outcome of the philosophical ideas through 
which men interpreted the world, there grew up in 
the Roman church the doctrine of transubstantiation, 
which means, practically, that the wafer in the hand 

125 



126 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

of the priest, after consecration, becomes transformed 
by a miracle into the actual substance of Christ's body, 
thus becoming efficacious for the salvation of the 
communicant. Some of the Reformers, notably the 
Swiss leaders, reacted from this time-honored belief 
of the Roman church, and held that the bread and 
wine were aids to the memory in recalling that 
supreme event, the crucifixion of Christ with its aton- 
ing value, and that only as a symbol, stimulating 
memory and imagination, could it react upon the reli- 
gious life and be of avail. This is the thought commonly 
held today by the great multitude of Protestant people. 
But there is an interesting story of how Luther, him- 
self a vigorous rebel against Roman ideas at most 
points, and a free interpreter of the Scriptures when 
he wished to be, was at this point a literalist of the 
literalists, and in controversy with his opponents put 
his big finger on the words in the Latin Bible which 
read: "Hoc est corpus meum." "That settles it," 
Luther said; "the bread is the literal body of Christ, 
and the wine his literal blood." 

Now, all these distinctions and controversies have 
so completely faded out of the interest of the modern 
mind that I may have difficulty in absolving myself 
from the charge of pedantry in even making reference 
to them. We are likely to feel a trifle impatient over 
matters which do not at once disclose their contem- 
porary meaning and vitality. But the only way to 
make a past age and its thought become alive is to 
see it through the instrumentalities and ideas by which 



SACRAMENTAL VALUE OF MATERIAL THINGS 127 

we face reality in our own time; and then to remem- 
ber that these instruments and ideas, so useful and 
vital to us, may become as antiquated to a future age 
as those of past ages are to us. The real question 
always is : How do men try to interpret the realities of 
life? What is the thing they are really after? 

Now, I take it that the most fundamental differ- 
ence between past times and the present time is that 
the past, which came down from Greece through 
Rome and to the very threshold of today, interpreted 
the world and God and man in static terms. The 
present is beginning to interpret these same things in 
dynamic terms. To the ancient world, therefore, "sub- 
stance" was the key-word to everything. To the 
modern world "activity" is the key-word. The mind 
of man was once regarded as a state of consciousness ; 
it is now held to be a series of functions. Man was 
once thought of as a being who has body, mind, and 
soul; now he is regarded as "a behaving organism," a 
nucleus of activities which express themselves, now as 
feeling, now as thinking, and now as acting, receiving 
impressions from the surrounding world, and in turn 
reacting upon the outer world. Once it could be said : 
"Man does what he is;" now it is almost the reverse : 
"Man is what he does." 

Bear it in mind, therefore, that when we talk today 
in terms of organism, of function, of activity, we are 
after the same great end that men long ago were after 
when they talked in terms of state, of substance, of 
being. That is to say, they and we are after reality. 



128 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

We want to discover the thing which gives vital mean- 
ing and connection to this whole mighty world in 
which we live ; and so did they. 

I can understand that the men who came together 
in the fourth century in the Nicene Council, who came 
in such throngs and with such tremendous interest in 
the questions involved, were dealing with very grave 
contemporary reality when they disputed over such 
terms as homo-ousios, homoi-ousios, and hetero-ousios. 
Was Christ of the same substance with God, of similar 
substance, or of different substance? That was their 
three-cornered controversy, which seems so remote from 
us only because the terms and the philosophical assump- 
tions are remote. But when we recall that the only 
reality they were concerned about was that of interpret- 
ing the way by which the divine life gets into contact 
with the world and with human life, and keeps in con- 
tact with it, we instantly see how their problems come 
over and stand side by side with our problems. And 
so long as they thought in terms of substance, and 
regarded everything in the static way, they must cer- 
tainly find the solutions to their particular problems in 
the only terms which had any meaning to them. 

In the same light we read the meaning of the 
Roman doctrine of transubstantiation. Here, again, 
it was a concern for substance, a desire to have the life 
of man participate in the reality of the divine nature. 
And granted a world thought of only in static terms, 
and granted also the ease and necessity of divine inter- 
position at any moment in a miraculous act, making 



SACRAMENTAL VALUE OF MATERIAL THINGS 129 

any strange and unusual thing possible, it is easy to see 
how significant and real might be the conception of a 
material thing, like a wafer of bread, being trans- 
formed into the actual body of the Redeemer, enabling 
the believer by feeding upon the substance of that 
body to find for himself redemption and peace. "A 
crude and gross interpretation!" we exclaim. Yes, 
that indeed ; but at the same time an interpretation, 
growing out of a search for reality, and becoming 
therefore a challenge to anyone who also sets out in 
search of reality, and who is determined to make the 
world in which he lives luminous, and unified, and 
satisfying. 

It is at this point, then, that these ancient questions 
and issues acquire new interest and significance. We 
are challenged to interpret anew, as it were, the sacra- 
mental significance of life. Let us drop back a moment, 
then, to the literal and root meaning of a sacrament. 
What is it? It is the means or instrument of sacred- 
ness. It is the visible and material agency by which we 
acquire and experience some spiritual reality which 
can come only through the material instrument. 

Now let us face the full tide of our real life and 
ask : What things are sacraments ? The answer comes 
quickly : All things are sacraments which are the tools 
and agencies and channels for acquiring life, for 
actually coming into the possession and experience of 
the fulness of life. The body with its uses is a sacra- 
ment, for the reality of life which manifests itself 
through the body. The material world, appropriated 



130 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

by the senses, used and manipulated by man, is a sacra- 
ment for the interpretation of the greater unseen world 
which we never know except as it functions through 
the material world. 

We need not be afraid, therefore, of this word 
"sacrament." We need to restore and reinterpret it. 
We need to emphasize the sacramental value of every 
visible and material thing about us. We need to be 
sure that every visible and material thing is real, that 
it has actual and not sham existence, and that it exists 
for the purpose of revealing, for serving and promot- 
ing some finer spiritual reality which acts through it. 
And we must "eat of this body," if we are to live. 

There are two reasons in particular why we need 
to have a more vivid realization that the bodily, earthly, 
and material things are sacraments of the spirit : in the 
first place, because there is a great multitude who deny 
that there is any material and earthly fact to become a 
sacrament for the spirit, that the spirit alone exists, 
and that all else is an illusion of the senses; in the 
second place, because there is a far larger number who 
make the material and earthly an end and achievement, 
and so cut it off from being a sacrament to reveal and 
interpret the spirit. 

There has always been a certain type of people 
who have denied the reality and value of the materia! 
world and the bodily life. Some of them have done it 
in a purely practical way — by running away from it, by 
seeking refuge in the desert, by building hermitages 
and monasteries, and by preaching the doctrine that 



SACRAMENTAL VALUE OF MATERIAL THINGS 131 

the body with its passions is the foe of the soul, and 
the world with its allurements and its entangling ac- 
tivities is the sure death of the spirit. Therefore they 
have denied the world by leaving it to one side, by flee- 
ing from it, by attempting the task of building up a 
spiritual life as remote as possible from the threaten- 
ing foes of the spirit. 

But the corresponding type of people in the modern 
world go a step farther. They not only affirm that the 
earthly and material are foes of the spirit; they affirm 
that the earthly and material do not exist, that nothing 
exists but spirit, and that to affirm the non-existence 
of any disquieting foe of the spirit is to rout it. Now, if, 
the hermits and the monks, the Neoplatonists and the 
Christian Scientists, are right, there is of course no 
such thing in the world as a sacrament. No material 
and earthly thing can become the instrument and vessel 
of the sacred, the good, and the beautiful. We must 
pass behind the sacrament to the sacred reality at once. 
We must break the goblet in order to drink the wine 
it holds. 

Curiously enough, this failure to recognize the 
reality of both the material and the spiritual, and the 
sacramental relation of the one to the other, is also 
made by that vast multitude which stands at the other 
pole — the people who are entirely absorbed in the 
things which could be made efficacious for spirit, 
drowned in the very ocean which could float the navies 
and merchantmen of a magnificent spiritual life. 

And this is the spectacle we are witnessing every 



132 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

day — the spectacle of men making a suicidal use of the 
powers and instruments out of which could come vic- 
torious achievement and glorious life; men of talent 
and genius prostituting the body to base ends, meeting 
a pitiable and tragic death, as did that architect of dis- 
tinguished name and fame the other day in New York ; 
men laying hold of the forces of wealth, the powers 
that build up the strength and sinew of a nation, but 
falling a prey to cupidity, to love of power or to ambi- 
tion for display, as we have learned again and again in 
the disquieting disclosures of these two or three years 
just past. The general attitude is perfectly expressed in 
the impulsive remark attributed to one of the men 
who are at the head of one of the most gigantic insti- 
tutions in the country. Asked to subscribe for some 
distinctly religious object, he replied: "Damn the 
church. It has never made any money." 

Xow, these two extremes bring into very clear relief 
the single thought on which I wish to lay emphasis 
today. A sacrament is any material thing which 
becomes an instrument and vehicle for the spirit. And 
in the large sense every earthly, bodily, and material 
thing is such a medium for the spiritual reality, push- 
ing up through it for expression ; and so every material, 
earthly, and bodily thing is a sacrament, an instrument 
of the hoi}- and the good. All these outward things 
are the necessary means through which God and the 
human spirit are perceived and spiritual blessings com- 
municated. It is the truth which Sir Oliver Lodge, 
the eminent English scientist, has just emphasized in 



SACRAMENTAL VALUE OF MATERIAL THINGS 133 

saying that all "nature is an aspect and revelation of 
God/' and that ''God is not a being outside the uni- 
verse, above its struggles and advances, but one who 
enters into the storm and conflict, and is subject to 
conditions as the Soul of it all." It is the truth 
expressed again by a distinguished Bampton lecturer 
years ago when he said : 

Each object of science reveals, not only the laws of its exist- 
ence, but also a part of God's nature. Each art reveals, not 
merely natural beauty, but human feeling which also is divine. 
The family life is full of the outward and visible signs of love, 
and love is of God. The common partaking, appropriation, and 
enjoyment of these things make them also partakers of each other 
and of God. They become the channels through which love and 
beauty and truth and all that constitutes the human and divine 

excellence enter into us And he who thus appropriates 

the world realizes at every turn the inner meaning of the words : 
"Take, eat, this is my body." 

It is not, therefore, by the denial of the sacramental 
significance of life that we are to look for more fruit- 
ful religious life. It is not by the reduction of the 
seven sacraments to two, but by the multiplication of 
the seven to seventy times seven, that we are to find 
new incentives to the dignity, the honor, and the 
sacredness of life. 

Let us teach and believe that the body is a sacra- 
ment of the spirit, the channel for communicating and 
perpetuating life which is divine; that therefore the 
body is to be kept clean and pure. Let us not forget 
what a great teacher of our day has said, that "the 
ultimate test of every question of personal or social 



134 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

virtue is its effect on the child in our midst, and yet 
more its effect on the unborn, with the fate of countless 
generations of whom every fruitful life is freighted." 

Let us teach and believe that wealth, industry, art, 
the creation of visible monuments of human skill, are 
the instruments of spirit ; and that therefore every man 
who sets his hand to produce a thing of use or beauty, 
and every man who puts his talent to interest to 
increase the actual wealth of the world, is serving and 
revealing the spirit that moves through it, and is there- 
fore called to know and remember that his work is 
godlike. 

Let us teach and believe that the state is divine; 
that there is not needed, as churchmen like Hildebrand 
believed, a rival institution of the spirit where the con- 
test should wage between church and state. For the 
state is mankind functioning in political relations, 
revealing the divine idea and message as to mutual 
human and social relations — the common-sense of 
most, gradually holding the fretful realm in awe. 

These are some of the things we need to learn, to 
bring into the forefront of consciousness. To pick out 
a few things and make them sacramental is to with- 
draw attention from the sacramental significance of the 
whole of life. The blessed sacraments, as the Fathers 
used to say, are the extension of the incarnation. 
Truly so. For this thought of an indwelling God which 
came to focus in the character of Christ, magnified and 
multiplied so that he will be realized as the indwelling 
presence and reality in the many human ways for 



SACRAMENTAL VALUE OF MATERIAL THINGS 135 

revealing and serving the whole round of human inter- 
ests — this thought alone will re-create for us the power 
of the religious life. 

These symbols — the bread and the wine — are a 
memorial of the essential divineness and sacredness of 
the things which we regard as earthly and material. 
It was the broken body of Christ which testified of 
his spirit of sacrifice. And it is our manner of using 
these outward things of life which testifies what man- 
ner of men we are in the inward choice of the spirit. 
"Take, eat, this is my body" — it is a heroic summons 
to the sacramental use of all our powers and of all the 
world. 



THE HIGHER LEGALISM 



"All things are lawful unto me, but I 
will not be brought under the power of 
any." — / Cor. 6:12. 



IX 

THE HIGHER LEGALISM 

Someone has written suggestively of "the higher 
lawlessness," calling attention to the fact that the 
reformers and redeemers of men are "numbered with 
the transgressors." The Christs are crucified between 
the malefactors. Men who break through law on the 
under side, into the world of unrestraint and evil, are 
indiscriminately catalogued, in the general opinion, 
with those who break through law on the upper side in 
the interests of larger righteousness and of more abun- 
dant life. And this is "the higher lawlessness." 

Now, the sentence from Paul which I have used for 
my text may be taken as an illustration of a companion- 
fact. It is a very striking summary of the higher 
legalism. It is the spirit of liberty respecting a law 
higher than liberty and recognizing a restraint stronger 
than the law. When the inner forces of a man's life 
have won the victory over something — over the tend- 
ency to crystallize into legalism, and the tendency to 
dissipate themselves in caprice and wilfulness — then 
the victory is complete. That is the achievement of 
character. And whether it express itself in terms of 
the higher lawlessness or the higher legalism, it wiil 
command our attention and be worth our study. 

Today it is the spirit of the higher legalism which 
I ask you to think about, as it is set forth in these 
nervous words of Paul : "All things are lawful unto 

139 



140 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.'' 
Let us take just a moment to get his personal point of 
view — to trace the road over which he had come. 
There was a time when Paul could not have said any- 
thing like this. It was foreign to his every habit of 
thought. His inherited ideas, his education, the entire 
atmosphere of his life, familiarized him with the spirit 
of legalism, but not of the higher legalism. He thought 
and acted in terms of tradition, of authority, of law, 
of precedent and custom. His daily life was a con- 
scientious observance of details, and routines, and mi- 
nute observances, where scrupulous regard alone made 
possible a man's peace of mind and gave him the sense 
of being at harmony with God. Paul could say with 
truth that he had been a Pharisee of the Pharisees- 
And it is needless to add that he had therefore been 
the adherent of a superb system of regulating life by 
the forms of law. No more perfect machinery has 
been devised than the system of the rabbis. It left 
nothing to personal initiative, no gaps for alternatives 
and options. It never lost sight of details in the vision 
of the whole life. It worked laboriously in the field 
of details, as an Italian mosaic-worker, with down- 
looking face, lays the bits of stone in the pavement 
on which the tramping feet of men are to walk. This 
was the legalism of which Paul of Tarsus was a loyal 
and illustrious pupil, and fast on the road of becoming 
a master-exponent. 

Then came the break — the vision of something 
large and soul-compelling. It was indeed a light which 



THE HIGHER LEGALISM 141 

smote him on the road to Damascus. He saw things 
which he had never seen before. The breath of God 
breathed upon this statuesque son of the law, and he 
became a living and moving spirit. His legalism had 
vanished, and he instantly became the champion of 
freedom, and of that splendid but much-abused quality 
of life which he described as "grace." 

Professor Wernle, writing upon "the beginnings 
of Christianity," says most suggestively that, although 
"Paul never knew Jesus during his lifetime, it was 
nevertheless he who best understood him. He was one 
of those scribes and Pharisees on whom Jesus called 
woe, the cause of whose moral and spiritual malady 
was just the theory, True religion is the law of the 
sacred nation — that and nothing else.' And now this 
scribe [Paul] destroyed the whole of this theory, took 
Jesus away from the sacred nation and brought him to 
mankind." So, then, it was not the apostles "whom 
Jesus called while he lived on earth to whom he con- 
fided the real spirit of his message," its emancipating 
power, and its catholic, world-wide significance; but 
it was this great persecutor of the Christians who in a 
moment, as it were, leaped into leadership. 

Now, the keynote of Paul's leadership, as we all 
very well know, was his marvelous, incisive message 
of freedom from law — a message which has been as 
inspiring and emancipating, and at the same time as 
much misunderstood, maligned, and travestied, as any 
idea which has ever become a working force in the 
life of mankind. 



142 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

It was travestied and misunderstood at once, right 
there in those Greek cities where Paul came in con- 
tact with a kind of champagne effervescence of moral- 
ity which translated freedom from law into the perfect 
propriety of doing whatever the inclination of the 
moment suggested. So these splendid letters of Paul, 
which deal with ideas so large that they seem cut out 
of the side of the mountain for very greatness, descend 
every here and there to deal with the most vulgar 
indecencies, the most commonplace dishonesties and 
immoralities, of people who had made the gospel of 
freedom the pretext for doing whatever they felt like 
doing. And it is on such a giddy band of converts as 
this, in that giddy town of Corinth, that he conde- 
scends to waste this splendid diction which embodies 
the thought we are following today: "All things are 
lawful to me, but all things edify not. All things are 
lawful, but I Avill not be brought under the power of 
any." It seems almost too bad, and entirely dispro- 
portionate, to be obliged to say such a thing as that to 
a man who was making of himself a common drunk- 
ard, or picking his neighbor's pocket, on the ground 
that he was under grace and not under law, and could 
therefore do as he pleased. We can almost see Paul 
hiding his face in his hands and exclaiming: "Did 1, 
then, abandon Pharisaism and come unto the aposto- 
late for such a thing as this !" 

It was certainly a bad break. And it might almost 
have set a less courageous man to asking himself 
whether it did not indicate a weak place in his gospel 
of grace. It certainly was a weak place for weak men. 



THE HIGHER LEGALISM 143 

History has proved that over and over again. Paul 
himself admitted that his gospel was strong meat, and 
he spoke with regret of the necessity for going back 
and administering milk to babes, pointing out to them 
the first elements in his way of life, and guiding their 
infantile footsteps past the point where they wandered 
away from the path which led to self-reliant character, 
into the byways of license and caprice. And the sub- 
sequent years of Christian history are strewn with the 
wrecks of ships that have lost their way and gone to 
pieces on this vast sea of spiritual freedom which 
builds up character by the law of an inner necessity, 
and not by the law of an outer and formal require- 
ment. The weak and the unsteady have foundered on 
this rock. 

What I should like to have you see today is the 
perfect sanity and balance in this direction for life 
which Paul pointed out. It is the indictment of legal- 
ism and lawlessness in one swift, incisive comment — of 
legalism which enslaves and of lawlessness which 
makes shipwreck. There is a breadth and calmness 
about it which remind one of those lines in Matthew 
Arnold's "Summer Night." You will recall his descrip- 
tion of the two classes of men — one the slaves of 
routine and of barren toil who die "un freed, having 
seen nothing, still unblest;" and the other class who, 
through their very break with routine and restraint, 
lose their way on the vast sea of life and suffer ship- 
wreck in the storm. And he asks : 

Is there no life but these alone? 
Madman or slave, must man be one? 



144 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

And then, turning to the stainless heavens of the sum- 
mer night, he makes his appeal : 

Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign 
Of languor, though so calm, and though so great, 
Are yet untroubled and unpassionate ; 
Who, though so noble, share in the world's toil, 
And, though so task'd, keep free from dust and soil ! 

.... You remain 
A world above man's head, to let him see 
How boundless might his soul's horizons be, 
How vast, yet of what clear transparency ! 
How it were good to abide there, and be free ; 
How fair a lot to till 
Is left to each man still. 

It is a parallel situation which Paul was meeting: 
on the one hand the slave of legalism, on the other the 
shipwreck of freedom ; and his steady voice comes out 
of the eternal peace and calmness of the very heavens : 
"All things are lawful unto me, but I will not be 
brought under the power of any." "All things are 
lawful unto me" — that is a free man's defiance of legal- 
ism and its narrowing routine. "I will not be brought 
under the power of any" — that is even better than 
freedom. It is a strong man, with a vision of reality, 
making it clear that, whatever growth and spread of 
wings a man may have, it is still his daily task to walk 
among the realities and relationships of earth, and to 
walk there, not as a slave, but as a free man, doing 
duty, obeying law, walking in the narrow path of the 
day's routine, fulfilling the relationships which are pre- 
scribed in the human situation itself and which must 



THE HIGHER LEGALISM 145 

not be evaded ; but doing it all with the sense of mastery 
of the whole situation, and with the determination not 
to be a slave, either in assuming the yoke or in putting 
it off. What a splendid liberty it is which asserts 
itself ! "All things are lawful, but I will not be brought 
under the power of any." I can do whatever I please; 
but there is one thing I please not to do : I please not 
to be the slave of my own liberty. 

Now, I find here in this maxim a lesson for our 
time; and it is a lesson naturally which looks in the 
two directions, as it steers its way so steadily here 
between the rock of legalism and the shoals of law- 
lessness. 

Let us glance for a moment, then, in the first place, 
at the lesson which it brings to our modern legalism. 
Our modern legalism is quite another thing than the 
old theological legalism, than the type in which Paul 
had been brought up, and also than those ideas which 
were once so familiar and so vital to our Protestant 
theology. The religious controversy has nearly played 
itself out. The fires which raged around the questions 
of faith and works, of law and grace, are no longer 
hot enough, not only to burn a martyr in, but hardly 
to warm one's hands at. Theological and religious 
legalism is a thing of the past, or at least is in quies- 
cence, destined doubtless to come to life in some form 
which accords more nearly with the reality of modern 
thinking. 

But there is a widespread legalism of the social and 



146 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

economic sort which is altogether vital in the life of 
today — a tendency to measure human relations and 
duties, or to evade responsibilities, upon the basis of 
existing laws ; a disposition to take one's stand on the 
basis of what is already established, to magnify the 
letter, and to circumscribe the situation with that 
which has been writ. 

There is a very true and significant sense in which 
the modern world has come to recognize itself as "free 
from the law" — in this sense, namely, that it beholds 
itself as a moving, and no longer as a stationary, world. 
The modern world is thinking in categories of growth, 
rather than of finality and authority. It looks back 
and sees everything as at once a germ and a seed. It 
looks forward and knows that the fruitage has not yet 
appeared. Now, when men thought of everything as 
final and fixed, as being in the state and character which 
had been stamped upon things at the outset, it was 
natural to fence all these things in with law — with law 
which became a barrier over which one might not pass. 
To know the law of a thing was to know its fixed 
nature, the form which had been given it once for all, 
not to be violated or transcended. 

But how is it with a world which, in so many 
aspects, has come to be regarded as a moving and grow- 
ing world? The physical world itself has come up 
through a long and troubled history. Races and tribes 
and nations are the organized expressions of a wonder- 
ful and continuous life. All these human ways of liv- 
ing which mark the relationship of men to one another 



THE HIGHER LEGALISM 147 

— the things we call liberties and rights — are likewise 
matters of growth, of continuous development and 
change, just as the world itself is, which lies at the basis 
of all. 

Therefore there is no legalism so blind as that 
which fails to recognize this continuous principle of 
growth in human life, in human society and institu- 
tions. Men of the eighteenth century used to talk of 
natural rights, and they believed it possible to find these 
natural rights, clear and simple and uncorrupted, by 
getting back of all conventions and usages to the 
origins of social order. But no man looks now in that 
direction to find such things. He looks forward and 
ever forward. The only natural rights are those which 
become natural by being naturalized — by being won out 
of the stern conflict and made inalienable through that 
eternal vigilance which is the price of liberty and life. 
There is nothing which may not become a natural 
human right, if man gets large and wise enough to see 
it and claim it, to incorporate and organize it into the 
social fabric of which he is a part. 

There are always some men who see that, in this 
tremendous clash and collision of human interests, 
there is always the prophecy of growth, that the very 
onset of force means that there is life down there in 
the heart of the struggle, and that the whole race of 
men is not doomed, like Matthew Arnold's slave, to 
die "unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest." .But 
there is a vast multitude of men so blinded by their own 
pecial and immediate interests that they do not see this. 



148 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

They cannot trace the path of growth and the upward 
trend of life in these troubles and chastenings which 
are not for the moment joyous but grievous. So there 
is a very widespread appeal to law for the sake of pro- 
tecting the mere status, of keeping things where they 
are, and of checking those instinctive and impulsive 
movements which have behind them the hunger of the 
human heart for ampler life. 

And this is our modern legalism — the spirit which 
cries out "Law, law," when there is a deep and death- 
less force back of all things today, just as there was 
once back of all things now codified in forms and laws 
— a force which is pushing and compelling things on 
to a goal which the eye of no man has yet seen. 

There is, then, the great need for some command- 
ing and prophetic voice to proclaim to this world of our 
great social and industrial order that, in a certain real 
sense we are free from the law — that we live in this 
world of relationships under the regime of grace. 
There needs some great wise leadership to recognize 
the enlarging human rights in all these crude, inchoate 
clamorings of the multitude — to recognize them, to be 
patient with them, to make place for them, to preserve 
what is solid and enduring in the heritage of the past, 
and still to keep on building. The legalism which is 
demanded is not that which recognizes in law nothing 
but the guardian of vested interests, and which applies 
the brake at every possible emergency, but that rather 
which sees in law the pawl in the ratchet to keep the 



THE HIGHER LEGALISM 149 

spring from unwinding, in order that it may have 
power to move things forward and to make the hands 
mark time on the dial plate of the social order. 

It is beyond the power of the mind to calculate the 
effect upon the social and industrial order of our day 
if there were in control a wise, far-seeing leadership 
which had the instinct of progress, and a perception of 
the law of progress ; if the young men who come out of 
the laboratories and lecture-rooms of the universities, 
where they have caught some vision of the vast moving 
world, could carry over this vision and this law of 
growth when they come to take their fathers' places at 
the wheels of industry and traffic. 

There needs some great, searching, far-reaching 
application of what is implied in the first sentence of 
these words of Paul: "All things are lawful for me." 
The surest way to preserve the sense of law and the 
respect for it is to sweep it into the stream of growth, 
and to see that a hundred things will be encompassed by 
law in the days to come, just as now a thousand things 
are so encompassed which had to win their place and 
privilege by coming, like the man from Bozrah, "red 
in his apparel and traveling in the greatness of his 
strength." There are a few men who, in the sore 
troubles thrust upon them in the conduct of modern 
industry and in dealing with men, recognize that, 
beneath blindness and stupidity, beneath human rage 
and selfish leadership, there are still some impelling 
forces of growth, without which men would willingly 
be slaves and do a slave's work. When the few men 



150 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

who see this become the many, when the maddening 
appeal to law merely to support the .status becomes a 
more generous recognition of what one New -Testa- 
ment writer calls "the law of liberty," then the way will 
become, not easy indeed, nor free from perplexity and 
the need of patience and breadth of view, but it will 
become clearer. It will become a kind of "way of the 
Lord," because it will have been co-ordinated with that 
greater process in accordance with which life from the 
outset has been shaped — a part of that "one divine 
event to which the whole creation moves." 

Such is the message of Paul to the legalism of our 
time. Now, what is his message to the contrasted 
situation — the spirit of lawlessness, the freedom that 
misreads itself in terms of personal caprice? The 
challenge has here even a clearer ring, if possible, than 
before. "All things are lawful, but I will not be 
brought under the power of any." 

A man is never really free until he can interpret his 
freedom in essentially that way. He may be subser- 
vient to the laws and customs and institutions which 
have grown up around him, and not have inner force 
and compelling desire enough to free himself from those 
things, remaining ever a blind, unheeding slave. In 
such case he certainly is not free. On the other hand, 
he may throw off the yoke — the fetter of social cus- 
tom, of personal duty, of political allegiance; he may 
become a free lance in thought and in the conduct of 
life; but unless somewhere at length out of that free- 
dom arises the sense of allegiance to what law and cus- 



THE HIGHER LEGALISM 151 

torn at the most were only tardily or clumsily express- 
ing, once more he is not free. A man is not free until 
he cannot be brought under the power of anything 
external to the working of his own life, and until he 
brings himself under the power of those things which 
underlie life and every possibility of its growth. It is 
easy to see, I think, how many people are continually 
making shipwreck of themselves because they have 
thrown off the outer bondage, but have not recognized 
the inner bondage. They are not masters, in the 
sense that they cannot say: "I will not be brought 
under the power of any." 

Take the world as it stands today, and what do we 
see ? We see a great many people who have persuaded 
themselves that certain institutions and customs are 
antiquated and outgrown. Therefore they break with 
them. And to what end? In order that a higher and 
more effective law may come into control ? Would that 
one might believe this to be oftenest the fact! But 
what we most commonly find, I fear, is the indictment 
of this, that, or the other thing, in order that some 
individual caprice may have play — in order that the 
compelling sanctions of duty which nestle in a given 
custom or institution may be branded as outgrown and 
thrown aside. 

I cannot discover, for instance, that the people who 
indict the permanency of marriage as it is established 
in current law and custom are primarily concerned to 
find a basis for a nobler and finer family life, for a love 
which shall become the channel of the patient devo- 



152 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

tions, the deepening sacrifices, the mutual adjustments 
out of which character slowly but surely forms. The 
indictment appears to be rather in the interest of some 
momentary preference, some passing fancy, some 
desire to escape the difficulties, the sacrifices, and the 
surrenders out of which have come the best fruits of 
character we have yet found. 

I cannot find, again, that the anarchistic impulses 
which actually find expression are rooted in a deep and 
grave concern for better government, for a finer 
justice and a fairer chance for personal achievement, 
so much as in a discontent which has thought itself 
out to no conclusion and no programme whatsoever. 
Think of the fatuity, the disorganized medley of im- 
pulses, which must be lurking in the nest of lawless 
folk who could deliberately plot to assassinate the 
present head of our own government, who, whatever 
may be said by friend or foe, is at least an unmis- 
takable democrat of the democrats ! 

Let us recognize that there is such a thing as the 
higher lawlessness, and that the true saviors of men 
are numbered with the transgressors. And doubtless 
in every age it is possible for men to get so rooted in 
custom, in tradition, and in the legal forms of right, 
that they are unable to distinguish the man who 
breaks the law from the upper side from the man who 
breaks it on the under side. They believe that Socrates 
is corrupting the young men of Athens, and they 
believe that Christ is destroying the law of Moses 
Therefore they crucify them both. But it is a far cry 



THE HIGHER LEGALISM 153 

from Socrates and Christ to the men whom Paul had 
in mind when he spoke that great clarifying word: 
"All things are lawful unto me, but I will not be 
brought under the power of any." There is no law 
against intemperance, gluttony, lust so all-compelling 
and persuasive as the inward law of self-control and 
self-respect which creates its own statute and enforces 
it. There is no commandment against robbery ana 
lying whch begins to have the sanction of that inner 
sense that we might rob our neighbor and lie to him, 
but that we will not. There is no probity like that 
which knows it might gain personal advantage and 
wealth, through manipulation of laws, through secret 
agreements, through subtle forms of bribery, and go 
unscathed, but which, knowing all these things, takes 
the ground of Paul: "I will not be brought under 
the power of any." 

We need everywhere, then, a revival of the sense 
of obligation. We need to see, as with the clearness 
of the judgment clay, that we are being daily judged 
by a law of liberty which is a law of liberty — an 
authority commanding as eternity itself, which binds 
us in on every side, which expresses itself in the com- 
mon duties and the daily tasks, and which cannot be 
escaped, cannot be ignored, cannot be repudiated. 
There is only one thing that can be done with it: it 
can be obeyed. But we may obey it as slaves, who 
know not its meaning, and who toil on with dull eyes 
and unthinking hearts. We may obey it as children. 



154 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

who have not yet learned its full meaning or the full 
use of their powers. Or we may obey it with free- 
dom and gladness, and turn the commandment into a 
song. We shall be "free from the law" when we have 
found it to be a "law of freedom;" when it become? 
to us, as Paul elsewhere said, "a schoolmaster" to lead 
us to Christ, under the spell of whose personality and 
in the atmosphere of whose spirit we shall learn to 
give spontaneous allegiance to what otherwise we 
might follow in slow and reluctant ways. And when 
we have found the free obedience and the obedient 
freedom which were his, we are no longer under a 
schoolmaster. We are free. 



WORK 



"Man goeth forth unto his work 

And to his labor until the evening." 

— Psalm 104:23. 



WORK 

The poet who set down these words in the familiar 
psalm was merely taking note of the orderly succession 
of natural events. He gives a picture of the obvious, 
yet always impressive, aspect of the outward world, 
and its effect upon a simple and unspoiled mind. 
There is the sky, with its changing glories. There 
are the hills and valleys, the seas and meadows, the 
wind and storm, the trees and the cattle, and the great 
rocks — the glint of light and the long shadows. These 
are always beautiful, and they always touch some deep 
places in our hearts, if we have kept our hearts true 
and sensitive to the great simplicities of life. 

Now, these are the things which this poet of old 
time saw, and set down in the rugged simplicity of 
Hebrew verse; and into this picture of the natural 
world, with its charm and its fidelity, he puts the pro- 
cession of men. He is not unmindful of the human 
factor. But he seems to see it as a part of the great 
panorama of the natural world: "Man goeth forth 
to his work and to his labor until the evening." 

You see the shepherd going forth to open the door 
of the fold and lead the flock to the meadows, and 
beside the streams where the grass is green. You see 
the farmer turning the dark furrows with his plow or 
harvesting the yellow grain. You see the village car- 
penter with his rude tools in his little shop, the shav- 

157 



158 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

ings of the fragrant cedar curling from his plane. 
Yonder upon the Sea of Galilee you see the fishing- 
boats and the anxious fishermen casting their nets on 
this side and on that. And through the doorway of 
every cottage you behold the faithful and busy 
housewife taking up the cares of the day and looking 
after the comfort of her own. Take it altogether it 
is a picture of the wholesome and simple life- which 
one may find in many places yet, on this ancient and 
teeming earth. Everywhere in all the vast and won- 
derful world there is the evidence of movement and 
activity, everywhere the spectacle of toil; and it is all 
a part of the endless procession of life. 

This psalm comes home to me today as a kind of 
connecting link between the country and the city. It 
seems to carry over a note of interpretation from the 
quiet and simplicity in which mankind began its life, 
to that great complex of activities in the midst of which 
many of us are destined, or prefer, to live. If there 
is ever a time when we ought to join in this psalm, 
fervently and with intelligence, it is when we come 
face to face with life in a great city after we have 
had the breath of the hills upon us, or felt the mighty 
throb of the sea; or come somewhere in more close 
and vital contact with the great earth on which man 
is ceaselessly dependent for bread, and health, and 
happiness, and life. This psalm should be set down 
in our book of common worship as the psalm to be 
read after a sojourn in the country. And then per- 
haps you will enjoy as a companion lyric some verses 



WORK 159 

altogether modern, but which have something of the 
same feeling and spirit as the old psalm, and which 
certainly could have been written only by one who was 
himself once a farmer's lad : 

Let me follow in the furrow while you turn the black soil over ; 
Let me breathe the smell of Mother Earth I have not known 
so long. 
Here last summer through the sun and rain grew timothy and 
clover, 
Here again I feel my heart .alive with all the joy of song. 
Though I come each spring-returning to the same instinctive 
rapture, 
It could never be more wonderful a transport than today. 
Let me follow in the furrow that my heart may so recapture 
The dreams that chased the swallow's flight and lost it far 
away. 

Let me feel the early passions and the primal instincts thrilling 

Every deadened inspiration of the plowshare and the sod, 
Till the warm, moist earth with ecstasy my eager soul is filling, 
Such as Jed my steps in boyhood when the plowman's path I 
trod. 
Here the corn shall lift its greenness while the rain-washed winds 
blow over, 
Till it bears the wealth of summer where the dark stalks droop 
and sway. 
Let me follow in the furrow, every sense an idle rover, 

With dreams that chased the swallow's flight and lost it far 
away. 

But this, after all, is by way of prelude. I am not 
here today to present a brief in behalf of the bucolic 
life, nor to join in the wail over the noise and con- 
fusion of a great city. I do not come back to my post 



1 6c THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

in any spirit of pining for the dear New England hills, 
which I love with all the passion of one who was born 
among them. For I love this place too, this teeming 
and tumultuous town with its hidden prophecies of a 
great future, and more and more I prize the privilege 
of standing here among men who help to shape its life 
and who have part in its great destiny. But just as 
one, by skilful development of a photographic nega- 
tive, is able to accentuate and throw into prominence 
some feature which lies among the half-lights on the 
plate, so I ask you today to bring to the forefront 
that which drops as an incidental and parenthetic ele- 
ment into this psalm written in praise of the natural 
world. Let us accentuate and survey for a little this 
ceaseless human fact, of ever-changing form and inter- 
est — the fact of work. For it was, after all, man in 
the act of toil which this poet put into his idyl of sim- 
plicity and peace. And it is about man's work that I 
should like to say something today. 

Through the history of language itself one may 
thread his way back to the most fundamental ideas. 
If you start with our strong Anglo-Saxon "work" as 
such a thread, you will wind back and back until at 
last you are face to face with the word which reappears 
in our English word for "energy." And there you are 
down to bed-rock : work — energy ; the one the counter- 
part and interpretation of the other. On the one hand 
the ceaseless expression of force, of vitality, of energy 
welling up out of the universe itself ; on the other hand 
the human activity which, under control of the intelli- 



WORK 161 

gence of man, shapes and directs this universal energy 
to wise and beneficent ends. The work of man is that 
which gives coherence, and value, and purpose to the 
energy of the world. 

I am perfectly aware that a definition of work of 
this sort might awaken a smile of derision in some 
quarters. The association of amalgamated tramps 
would cry out at once : "Coherent humbug ! Work is 
just work; and it's hard and dreadful — a good deal 
easier to run away from than to do." Then there are 
some who still intrench themselves behind the primi- 
tive biblical conception of labor as a curse. It is urged 
that man was set to earn his bread in the sweat of his 
brow only because he sinned and fell ; and that but for 
his fall he would even now, with all his descendants, 
be eating the fruits of the garden as they fell into his 
indolent lap. And we are reminded that the Bible 
which at the beginning stigmatizes labor as a curse is 
ever looking forward to man's release from toil, and 
as its highest reward points to the day when "the saints 
shall rest from their labors." 

This primitive view of labor as a curse, which 
necessarily would be reflected in the primitive scrip- 
tures of the race, has had a long and mighty hold upon 
men. It has affected human jurisprudence. The law 
sentences the prisoner to hard labor in the penitentiary. 
The "hard labor" is an intended punishment. It is part 
of the penalty of wrong-doing. But in reality what a 
blessing in disguise — not to be mentioned with the 
terror of sentencing a man to hard and continued idle- 



162 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

ness in the penitentiary ! The beneficent aspect of work 
thus leaks out through man's very effort to make it the 
highest expression of contempt and penalty. 

Thus through this twofold tendency — on the one 
hand a certain native indolence which shirks activity, 
and on the other the doctrine long fastened upon us that 
labor is the primitive curse of God upon the disobedi- 
ence of man — the world has naturally grown up into 
a somewhat warped and gnarly notion of what human 
labor really is, and how it gears into the eternal crea- 
tive energy of the whole world, the creative activity of 
the divine life itself. Phillips Brooks once remarked : 

The strangest thing about work is the way in which all men 

praise it, and yet all men try to get away from it There is 

no live man who does not feel a certain excited sense of admira- 
tion, a certain satisfaction, a certain comfort that things are right, 
when he stands where men are working their hardest, where trade 
is roaring or the great hammers are deafening you as they clang 
upon the iron. Everywhere work, and the approval of work ! 
and yet everywhere the desire to get away from work ! 

And doubtless there have been certain aspects of human 
toil which have almost justified the misconception. We 
can certainly enter with heartfelt sympathy into the 
feelings of the tired, worn-out woman who had 
drudged and slaved all her life. "What are you going 
to do when you go to heaven?" she was asked. "First 
of all," was the weary and touching reply, "I am going 
to sit down in some nice pleasant place and do nothing 
for a thousand years." 

So it sometimes seems a long way from the carica- 
tures of human indolence or human ignorance to the 



WORK 163 

thought of labor as the gearing of man's energy into 
the divine and world-wide energy. Nay, rather (for 
that is too mechanical a view of it), it is the putting- 
forth of human energy in order that the world-energy 
may find a voice. To work is to give coherence, and 
value, and purpose to the powers, and forces, and 
material which man finds about him. That is the work 
into which all men may put courage and hope, and in 
which they may find joy. "Blessed is the man," John 
Burroughs has somewhere remarked, "who has some 
occupation in which he can put his heart, and which 
affords a complete outlet to all the forces there are 
in him." 

Now, I want to speak very briefly of three profound 
influences which are exerting a vast and radical modi- 
fying effect upon the meaning of human work and our 
attitude toward it. It is being influenced by industrial 
forces, by artistic impulses, and by the general educa- 
tional progress. 

Let us note, in the first place, for a moment, the 
influence of the industrial forces upon the fact and the 
conception of labor. In its superficial aspect this influ- 
ence is a protest; for the time being, and notably in 
the great centers of industry, it is often a bitter protest. 
It is labor set over against capital. It is industry of 
brawn claiming its rights against industry of brain. It 
is the effort to accomplish by political forces what can 
never really be gained except by the triumph of per- 
sonal forces — character, and breadth of view, and a 



164 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

larger vision of life. It is oftentimes a striking-out in 
the dark, hitting friend and foe, or hitting nothing at 
all. 

I not infrequently congratulate myself that I have 
the privilege of preaching to a congregation of men 
who work, and of men who have the obligation of toil 
upon them. I should not wish to preach to any other. 
But, in the midst of such wholesome reflections as that., 
one can scarcely miss the humor of recalling how very 
few of you would be considered welcome candidates to 
join in the procession on Labor Day. What an amus- 
ing and instructive situation it presents — a group of 
men who labor confessedly, but who are not laboring 
men; a company of men who are industrious but who 
could not be admitted to the ranks of industry. You 
could not come with your ledgers, nor you with your 
schoolbooks, nor you with your professor's lecture, nor 
you with your lawyers' brief, nor you with your phy- 
sician's case, nor you with your architect's blueprints 
in your hand. Nor do I suppose that the fact that I 
have hammered and sawed and planed and nailed 
all summer in a little labor enterprise of my own, and 
for clays long enough to make the walking delegate 
turn gray, would furnish the least credential to the 
labor procession, so long as the tell-tale sermon was 
anywhere in sight. 

This is one of the penalties which must perforce be 
suffered in passing through an era of industrial recon- 
struction — the penalty of laboring and being regarded 
an idler by those who have appropriated the name of 



WORK 165 

worker. It is the penalty of having some of the best 
work, the most necessary and precious of human contri- 
butions, discounted in behalf of that which is the most 
primitive and elementary in character. Almost anyone 
can drive nails and lay brick (I speak from experi- 
ence), but "the hand that rounded Peter's dome" is 
not attached to the body of every workman. Almost 
any immigrant, five minutes after landing at Ellis 
Island, can begin digging a ditch, but they are few in 
all the world who can mold a Venus, or a Minute Man 
such as looks down the road from Lexington Com- 
mon, or a group of the Great Lakes such as emanates 
from genius nearer home. 

It is easy to feel bitter and sore over the misconcep- 
tions which grow out of ignorance and blindness. But 
it is far better to be patient and tolerant and to wait. 
What matters it that men think you don't work if you 
really do, and if you are conscious in your heart that 
you are sincerely trying to make some contribution to 
the welfare of the world? Down underneath all the 
industrial ferment of today I am sure we may see 
clearly this one fact, that all labor is compelled to 
justify itself as genuinely and really labor. It must 
not be idleness under the guise of work. It must not be 
gambling under the form of trade. It must not 
be theft under the protection of law. That is the heart 
of the industrial protest. And one day it will be per- 
fectly clear again that a man may work through any of 
the countless avenues of human activity, and it will be 
recognized as work. The thing which will not pass 



l66 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

muster and will not survive, and does not deserve to 
survive, is the mock-labor — the countless tricks and 
evasions which, given rein, would turn the whole world 
of men into a veritable gambling hell. Do you recall 
those pregnant lines of Edwin Markham's, who, 
looking down on the Wall Street pit, describes its heli 
of faces swirling and surging, and all for what? 

A handful of bright sand, 

To buy a shroud with and a length of earth. 

And then he turns to think of the truer and saner 
ways of life: 

Wiser the plowman with his scudding blade, 
Turning a straight fresh furrow down the field — 
Wiser the herdsman whistling to his heart, 
In the long shadows at the break of day — 
Wiser the fisherman with quiet hand, 
Slanting his sail against the evening wind. 

Let us be perfectly sure that a Labor Day will 
come, and the basis of admission to the procession, or 
rejection from it, will be that which the great Master 
forecast in his parable: "Lo, thou hast been faithful 
over a few things. I will make thee ruler over many 
things. Enter thou into the joy of thy lord." 

And now a word regarding the reinterpretation of 
labor under the influence of the artistic spirit. To my 
mind there is no more hopeful token of progress than 
that which emanates from the determination to see the 
quality of beauty in all sincere human handiwork, and 
to find some genuine joy in the doing of it It betokens. 



WORK 167 

in the first place, a new baptism of art. For art has 
oftentimes concerned itself with the mere frills of life. 
It has been occupied with some dainty prettiness, or 
has catered to an aristocratic love of display. The 
artist, like the court-fool, has danced attendance to 
kings and queens. It makes one sad and indignant to 
think of men of the genius of Rubens painting their 
holy families, and most prominent of all in the fore- 
ground the full-length portrait of some fat burgher 
whose ducats furnished the wherewithal. The artist 
has felt under the necessity of finding a patron; and 
to come under patronage is the surest way to open the 
door to the prostitution of one's work. The man who 
is not free to express what he sees, what he thinks, 
what he feels, is a slave, no matter how grand or lofty 
the work he does. 

One of the most significant forces working in 
human life today, proceeding as an impulse and vision 
of the artistic spirit, is the tendency to look for beauty 
and its satisfaction in all the products of our human 
toil. There is a grace and charm which enters into the 
simplest fabrics and the commonest objects of daily 
use. It finds its way there because there is a deep 
instinct for beauty in the human heart. It may need 
tutoring and culture, but it does not need divorce from 
daily life, and from the uses and needs of daily life. 
You do not need a villa in order to surround yourself 
with that which gives grace and expresses the love of 
beauty — harmonious colors, and simple forms that are 
sincere and sturdy and honest. You may have them 



168 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

even in a rented flat, if you are patient and adroit. 
And, unless somehow these things are in you as a 
grace of spirit, you cannot have them even if you have 
the villa; for you cannot say to the decorator and 
upholsterer : "Go to now. Make me a lovely house." 
Someone has truly remarked that "the supreme 
reaches of life in what man creates, and in what 
expresses his truest individuality, are utterly dead to 
the idea of profit; there is nothing to exchange them 
for." And William Morris, who is the source of so 
much of the modern artistic impulse, observes that 
"the only real way to enjoy life is to accept all its 
necessary ordinary details and turn them into pleasures 
by taking interest in them." It is this impulse which 
is certain to transform eventually much of life, because 
it teaches us to look for the expression of beauty in 
the things of use and in the products of toil, and not 
as an appendage which can be had and appreciated 
only by the elect. 

Finally, then, a word as to the influence of educa- 
tional progress upon our thought of human toil. I 
shall find it hard not to say here what I have said a 
hundred times. For it grows more and more evident 
that the forces of education are making havoc of two 
things which the older culture counted dear — scholas- 
ticism and aristocracy. It is not that more people are 
getting educated, and more schools getting established, 
and the public school system ramifying into the field 
of higher education in the greater number of our states. 



WORK 169 

The significant thing, rather, is the wide conception 
of what education is. 

There is, indeed, great peril, under the pressure of 
the practical and utilitarian spirit, that we should come 
to lose the sense of the value there is in what have been 
called the humanities and the cultural aspects of edu- 
cation ; but there is, perhaps, quite as much danger 
that the humanity and the culture should leak out of 
these things, and that nothing should be left but an 
arid pedantry — and the old notion that the book-man 
is the only educated man in the community. 

There was once a man, and he had a son — I am 
giving you now a little story of real life; for I knew 
the man, and I know the son. The man was a clergy- 
man of the fine scholarly type. He loved books, and 
he loved to live among them, and he had a gracious 
spirit, and did his good work in his own good and 
profitable way. And he had a son. And one day this 
son, then a little fellow, came with great glee into his 
father's study and showed him a little toy that he had 
carved out with his knife. It was very ingenious. And 
he had actually succeeded in making it go by some 
mechanism within it. And the boy was very proud 
and happy, and he naturally wanted to show it to his 
father. And I suppose he thought his father might 
— well we can imagine what he supposed his father 
might do. But this is what his father did, this good 
man who loved a good book. He looked up from the 
page long enough to give this boyish product a hasty 
glance, and said : "Yes, yes, that is very good. But 



170 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

when will you ever learn to love your books?" The 
father .never knew, but this is what the boy did — he 
never told anyone until he grew up, and married, and 
told his wife; but he carried his toy back to the wood- 
shed, and with tears of disappointment in his eyes 
took the ax and smashed it to bits. 

There is a city, one of the loveliest cities in the 
land; and into this city, ten or a dozen years ago, 
came a young architect. And as I have gone back to 
this city from time to time I have been filled with admi- 
ration for the fine quality, the originality, the sincerity, 
of a considerable number of public buildings, as well 
as many private residences, which have been com- 
mitted to this architect. His sense of design and his 
sense of color are superb. His work has already 
acquired distinction, and his professional service is 
already in wide demand throughout the state which he 
has made his home. And this young architect was 
the little lad who went disappointed out of his father's 
study, with his father's question ringing in his ears: 
"When will you ever learn to love your books ?" 

Now, this story is symptomatic of a great change 
that is going on in subtle and unnoticed ways. We are 
coming to see that books are tools of the mind for one 
who knows how to use them, and who is called to use 
that kind of tool. But they are only one kind of tool. 
A man is not educated because he possesses books, nor 
necessarily because he has read them. He is educated 
only if he knows how to use these instruments in crea- 
tive activity of his own. And that is the case with 



WORK 171 

every tool and instrument which a man uses. What 
does he do with it? How wise and broad-minded and 
skilful and original is he, in making his individual 
powers the interpreter of the powers and forces in the 
world around him? That is the criterion of culture, 
the test of the educated man. All else is pedantry; 
and pedantry is the starvation of life. 

In conclusion, then, let me ask you to think about 
your work — to bring it to the test of these searching- 
judgments which are sweeping over the face of the 
world. Think about it as an expression of your per- 
sonal life. Think of it as the means given you to give 
body and coherence and aim to the great universe- 
forces. And then, if in your imagination you can 
identify these universe-forces with the wisdom and 
love of God, the one who with us lives and works, you 
will be able to rise to the point of view which Christ 
took — that point of view which becomes both light 
and inspiration: "My Father worketh continuously, 
and so do I." That is the highest reach of the human 
spirit, to conceive of one's work as a part of the divine 
activity itself. The daily life, with its tasks and occu-: 
pations, its duties and its cares, its problems to solve, 
its burdens to carry, its beauty to appreciate and enjoy 
— all these become an echo and reflection of what the 
infinite activity itself is. And then — 

The trivial round, the common task, 
Will furnish all we ought to ask — 
Room to deny ourselves ; a road 
To bring us daily nearer God. 



"WHERE THERE IS NO VISION THE 
PEOPLE PERISH" 



"Where there is no vision the people 
perish." — Proverbs 29 : 18. 



XI 

"WHERE THERE IS NO VISION THE 
PEOPLE PERISH" 

In the history of language, "vision" and "wisdom" 
spring from the same tap-root; and that root is the 
old Saxon word "wit." The man who has wit is at 
once the man who knows and the man who sees. The 
wise man is the seer. 

But wisdom has a great range and scope. Like 
the walls of the New Jerusalem, it has gates on all 
sides, and the gates are open day and night. There is, 
first, a wisdom which sees and understands the past; 
gathers up the fragments of bygone experience in 
order that nothing may be lost. It perpetuates the 
deeds of men and the career of nations. In the form 
of maxim and precept, of biography and history, it 
reflects upon the past and gives us counsel thereby. It 
is the wisdom of the sage. 

There is another kind of wisdom which grasps 
the present. It lays hold of the immediate reality. It 
tries to understand the fact and bring it clearly into 
view. It is the wisdom of explanation and description, 
or what we commonly call the wisdom of science. 

Now there have been periods of revolt when the 
past seemed like an incubus to be thrown off — eras 
like those of Rousseau and Shelley, when for one brief 
and feverish moment it seemed possible to build the 
world anew. There have been men like Alphonso of 

i75 



176 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

Castille, who regretted that he was not present at 
creation, because he could have given the Creator such 
excellent advice. But such eras and such manner of 
thought appear to us now essentially unreal and gro- 
tesque. They voiced a wisdom which was not wise in 
the power of the backward look. There was no true 
sense of the past, no clear vision of history, no ade- 
quate perception of the law and significance of growth. 
Revolt and rebellion are at times unavoidable expedi- 
ents of progress ; but they are not the things by means 
of which we live. Therefore the first formula and 
application of our proverb would be that without a 
true perspective and vision of the past the people 
perish. 

But, again, there are other ages which have lost 
their grip on the present. And when there flows from 
life the blood of reality, when there fade the health 
and strength which come from the iron and tonic of 
fact, life takes on the pallor of death. Therefore 
every little while there must needs come a renaissance 
in literature, in art, in education, and in religion. Com- 
monly such movements have their origin in a clearer 
grasp of some forgotten reality in nature or in human- 
ity. The claims of science, and the protests of realism 
in literature and art, are in the main wholesome; for 
they ask us to be wise in the wisdom which comes from 
a better understanding of the life immediately around 
us. They rest upon the principle that without the 
vision of the present the people perish. 

Therefore we need at least these two kinds of wis- 



VISION 177 

dom: the wisdom of the sage and the wisdom of 
science, both the vision of the past and the vision of 
the present. For where there is no insight into the 
value of experience, and where there is no grasp of 
living reality and immediate fact, the people perish. 
There is no greatness or power or sweep of life with- 
out the two. 

But this is not yet all. There remains the supreme 
order of vision which sees the future. By usage and 
general consent we have come to think of the seer or 
prophet as fulfilling a function which supplements and 
corrects the perceptions of the man who deals with 
past experience alone, or the man who is occupied with 
present fact alone. The vision of the seer reaches the 
future, yet not in the capacity of magician or predictor 
of events. It penetrates the future, not as a segment 
of time, but rather as a fulfilment of the fragmentary 
and partial life which has already come into view. It 
is not given to any man to see life as a whole, to 
behold it in its completed meaning; but it is given him 
to see those tendencies and currents which indicate 
the whole. No man can see around the earth, but he 
may measure its majestic curve when he stands on the 
shore of the sea and watches the great ships pass 
beyond the horizon. And that is something greater, 
at least something in addition to the power of tra- 
cing the rivers that flow into the sea from their far- 
away mountain springs, or marking the rise and fall 
of the tides upon the shore. And this capacity which 
-man has, which perhaps all men have to some degree. 



178 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

and which the race has representatively in its seers and 
prophets — this capacity for measuring the part by the 
whole, for reading the true meaning and purpose of 
the fragments of life as they come and go — is per- 
haps the highest order of vision, without the exercise 
of which life is indeed a poor and perishing thing. 
And it was perhaps of this the old writer was think- 
ing in particular when he wrote his proverb : "Where 
there is no vision the people perish." 

Now, it is altogether unnecessary to try to define 
the relative values of these three kinds of wisdom. 
They cannot be partitioned or sundered one from 
another. It is easy to see that neither, by itself, leaves 
life complete or capacious. The man who is wise in 
the past alone, and who clings to experience as the 
sole wisdom, becomes a hide-bound traditionalist, a 
conservative with whom one will not wish to live. 
The man, again, who is wise only in the measure of 
fact and the keen scent for the immediate reality, is 
likely to be a hard, matter-of-fact, unimaginative kind 
of person, oblivious of the things that soften the asperi- 
ties of life and irradiate its tasks and burdens with 
gleams of hope. And the man who takes interest only 
in the future is a visionary and a dreamer, with whom 
you must soon part company if you are to keep your 
feet on the earth at all. 

If you could really incarnate in one person the wis- 
dom which appreciates and treasures all the experi- 
ence of the past, interpreting the slow process of 
growth, and conserving all truth as a great and sacred 



VISION 179 

tradition; and the wisdom which comes from a clear 
perception of the actual need and opportunity of the 
moment, launching out on that tide which, taken at the 
flood, leads on to fortune ; and then combine with this 
the wisdom which sees the drift of things, measures the 
arc which has not yet swung into sight, and gears into 
the purpose which through the ages runs — you would 
then have a wise man and a capacity of vision which 
would be great and clear enough to keep the whole 
race of man swinging in its orbit, or moving on to its 
distant goal. The three kinds of wisdom must com- 
monly supplement each other in different personalities. 
Each gains ascendency at different times and receives 
emphasis in disconnected ways. 

Therefore, if I seem to lay chief stress upon the 
wisdom which looks ahead, let me not be misunder- 
stood as ignoring the immense significance of that wis- 
dom which rests solidly upon achieved experience, or 
that other wisdom which springs to meet the need and 
opportunity of today. It is only because here is the 
gleam of tomorrow upon our yesterdays and our 
todays, that I ask you to look up and see the meaning 
of the gleam, and beg you, like the young mariner of 
Tennyson : 

Call your companions, 
Launch your vessel, 
And crowd your canvas, 
And, ere it vanishes 
Over the margin, 
After it, follow it, 
Follow the gleam. 



180 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

It would be interesting to follow the principle into 
some of its larger, world-wide relations; to see in it 
what might be called the "law of nations;" to note 
how invariably the nation which loses the leadership 
of its men of vision sinks into torpor and decay; how, 
as the great prophet of Israel expressed it in his rug- 
ged Hebrew rhetoric, "when their eyes the prophets 
are closed, and their heads the seers are covered, the 
book of life becomes a sealed book and no man can 
open the seals." "Those are the great days and that 
the heroic age," as Mr. Gilder says so nobly in his 
verse, when men stand 

Guarding the country's honor as their own, 

And their own as their country's and their sons' — 

Defying leagued fraud with single truth; 

Not fearing loss ; and daring to be pure. 

And this means that, wherever men have some 
ideal and some standard of welfare that towers above 
the immediate and transient interest, they are laying 
hold of imperishable values. We shall not perish, 
we shall have everlasting life, so long as we have 
some vision of the value of the eternal goods, and 
some resolute hold upon them. 

It was in the spirit of the very highest, far-reach- 
ing statesmanship that one of our countrymen some 
time since wrote these words : 

America, with her vision of a completed democracy, an 
equality of opportunity, an aristocracy of character, her politics 
based on moral issues, seems to hold the future of civilization in 
her hands. America, the victim of her own prosperity, blinded 
by the very brightness of her real possessions so that she cannot 



VISION 181 

see her ideal interests; America, sunk in mammonism, and dilet- 
tantism and self-indulgence, would be abandoning her leadership 
and surrendering to social revolution and decay. She would be 
like a city which cannot be taken from without, but is captured 
by conspirators from within. It is her ideals which keep her 
< from a sensualism as base as that of Greece, and a decline more 
rapid than that of Rome. 

That reads almost like a chapter out of Isaiah. It is 
the same thing in purport, and it makes one realize 
the tremendous significance of the evident revival of 
the sense of righteousness which is now sweeping 
over the nation, laying hold of a reluctant Congress, 
forcing itself upon the attention of opportunist lead- 
ers who follow the line of least resistance and approve 
disinterested action only when it looks like a new 
form of self-interest. To keep alive this new convic- 
tion of righteousness; to save it from narrowness and 
hysteria ; to ally it with the stable and enduring forces 
of national life; to keep alive the sense of destiny — that 
certainly is to keep the vision of the imperishable and 
lay hold of everlasting life. 

It would be interesting to follow the truth of our 
proverb into these world-wide and general applica- 
tions. But just because they are so general we might 
lose something of the vividness of personal appeal. 
Therefore I wish to bring it into a narrower and more 
individual range of application. 

I should like to indicate its bearing for just a 
moment on those varying pursuits of our individual 
lives that we call our vocations. Our vocation is 
literally our calling and our calling is that to which 



1 82 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

we have been driven, either unconsciously by some 
inward urge of the spirit, or by the mere accident of 
the situation. We have long been accustomed to 
speak of men being "called to the ministry." But 
there should be no monopoly of the term by that 
single field of service. Such monopoly has helped to 
breed hypocrisy and complacency in far too many, 
and, what is worse, it seems to surrender other pur- 
suits and undertakings of life to a different law and 
a lower motive. The word "vocation" should be put 
forever on the shelf, or else so enlarged in scope as to 
cover every honorable work in human life and every 
man who enters nobly into any work. 

Now, both the work and the man are saved from 
perishing by the large view which connects the indi- 
vidual with the whole, and his little work with the 
vast labor working to an end. The great difference 
between men working in the same profession is fre- 
quently just a difference of vision, the perception 
which one has and another misses, of an end to which 
the work is means, of an inspiring whole of which 
the work is part. 

At one end of the lawyer's profession is the petti- 
fogger, with his small and contemptible ways; at the 
other end, the man with a large grasp of the princi- 
ples which have slowly crystallized through the years — 
a hold upon that framework of custom which gives 
to society its stability and its stature. It is a difference 
of vision. 

At one end of the teacher's craft is the mere 



VISION 183 

schoolmaster, with his wooden ideas, his deadening 
influence upon the forming life of the child; at the 
other end, the genuine teacher, who quickens into life 
and invites every dormant power to alertness and to 
growth. It is a difference of vision. 

At one end of the preacher's group is the priest 
peddling out his dead traditions and vaunting his 
small authorities ; at the other end is the prophet who 
is never so happy as when he finds a human heart 
responding to the message which glows within his 
own. It is a difference of vision. 

In the method of manual training which is find- 
ing its way here and there into our schools, there are 
some who see only a device for getting boys and girls 
a little sooner into the harness of bread-winning. 
There are others who cherish it first of all because it 
brings the child into creative relation with the materials 
and instruments of life, thus freeing human powers, 
and becoming educative in the highest sense. It is 
once more a difference of vision. 

I chanced to be with a friend of mine one day this 
summer when he was making a small purchase in a 
hardware store. As we came out he pocketed his 
purchase, and with a glow of real pleasure on his 
face exclaimed : "I love a store !" He was not a 
merchant or trader himself; but I was sure that I 
could understand the feeling of one who is by instinct 
and all the inward call of his powers elected by God 
to be a trader. I should be sorry to feel that there 
were not some men in the world who are elected to 



184 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

that calling, within which there may be the same 
range and difference of vision as in other callings. A 
man may be a mere "hoss trader," in the traditional 
sense of the word; but he may also have a sense of 
what the exchange of values means to the welfare of 
all men who derive convenience and advantage from 
the presence of the trader in the world. George 
Macdonald, in one of his early stories, describes a 
store in heaven. There is no reason why there should 
not be. And they would surely be directed by mer- 
chant princes in the very highest sense of the word. 

The important thing to see is that we cannot 
segregate human vocations, calling some of them high 
and others low. "Nothing is common or unclean 
which God hath cleansed." Every high calling may 
become low and vulgar if held to low aims, and every 
low calling may become high if geared to a worthy 
motive and a noble purpose. Where there is no vision 
the people perish, the vocation shrivels, the man 
becomes a dwarf. 

Let me now for a moment bring the subject to a 
still narrower range of personal application. The 
truth that is coming home to our time, almost with 
the force of a new revelation, is the truth that 
character is formed, and the growing life established 
on the rock, not so much by precept and injunction as 
by imitation, and by response to living and real inter- 
ests by which one is surrounded. One of the most 
thoughtful of our younger contemporaries has written 



VISION 185 

a book, of very great practical interest and value, on 
The Boy Problem. I suppose there may be such a 
thing as "the girl problem;" but there is at any rate a 
"boy problem." The writer recognizes what all teach- 
ers and investigators know — that one responds to the 
dominant interest. Therefore you cannot chastise 
into virtue ; perhaps not do very much to preach into 
virtue; certainly not to scold into it. But you may 
magnetize the soul by the electric currents of great 
interests and appeals so that they will unconsciously 
attract, and finally control. 

Dr. Tufts in a recent address says that 

conscious personal life gets its technique of control largely 
through suggestions from other persons. Contagious sympathy 
broadens the capacity for feeling; home, and all the later agencies 
of association, both offer opportunity for impulses to find real 
development and give steadying support to the gradually form- 
ing will I cannot, merely by taking thought, will to be 

wise, to control passion, to enjoy the refinements of civilization, 
any more than I can will to add a cubit to my stature. 

All this is profoundly true, and it helps us to see that, 
if we would save the generations from deterioration, 
and keep men from moral perishing, we must do it, 
not by precept or command so much as by the substi- 
tution of interests which will do their own preaching 
and commanding. Crowd your child with interests, 
if you want to help and keep him. If the dominant 
interests do not come from the higher side, they will 
come from the lower. And the parable of Christ will 
come true, as it has again and again, in most fearful 
ways, that the house that was swept and garnished 



1 86 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

will be invaded by the unclean spirits. Crowd your 
child with interests that will kindle the imagination, 
appeal to the feeling, and so control the will, and estab- 
lish character. That is the vision which keeps from 
perishing. 

One further word in conclusion. I want to ask 
you to take this proverb of the ancient wise man and 
see in it a true statement of the appeal which the 
church, with its worship and associations, and its 
organizations of the higher claims of life, ought reason- 
ably to make to us, the people of today. Whatever else 
it stands for, it ought surely to stand for the vision 
of life — for that large appeal to the imagina- 
tion which shall inspire and sustain and strengthen us 
for all the strain and the friction which life entails. 
It is not the loss of the authority of the church of 
which we need stand in fear; for the church through- 
out its history hitherto has claimed an authority and 
exercised prerogatives which cannot be permanently 
sustained. It is not the loss of its authority, but the 
loss of its inspiration — a prerogative as yet too little 
tested — of which we need have gravest concern. 

And it is the willingness of men to withdraw from 
sources of uplift and inspiration which we must con- 
ceive to be the imminent peril of multitudes upon mul- 
titudes. So blind and heedless are men that they do not 
see that there is already many a church which has no 
ambition or desire to exercise authority, to dictate 
belief, or to control the details of conduct ; which does 



VISION 187 

aspire to illumine, and quicken, and inspire; to give 
some sense of the largeness of life; to quicken hope, 
and the joy of service, and the sense of the worth of 
life, and the value of human comradship; and to 
quicken the capacity for faith, which one has nobly 
called "the sense and call of the open horizon; faith, 
which is the frailest thing we know, yet the least per- 
ishable, for it is a tongue of the central fire that burns 
at the heart of the world." 

Now, the church which conceives its mission to be 
of such a character possesses the power of vision 
which can preserve and keep from perishing. May 
we not conceive our own mission to be such as this? 
And may we not make the response, and give the 
allegiance and support which such a mission invites ? 

If the fire upon the altar of the public life is to 
burn without dimness, it must be fed by the vestals 
of our hearts' purest faith and loyalty. And this is 
why we worship. This is the meaning and the power 
of the religious life. It is because life perishes with- 
out its visions, and because we cannot see the vision 
clearly in the marts and press of life, that we need 
such moments as these, and such a place as this. And 
to just the degree that our human life increases in 
complexity and range, its reasonable meaning pressing 
on us more and more, does there increase also our 
need of vision and of uplift and of inspiration. 

There is a symphony of Hayden's which bears the 
name of the "Farewell Symphony." It was played 
on the evening before Hayden said a sad goodbye to a 



188 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

scene of pleasant work. And it was arranged that as 
the symphony went on one player after another should 
stop playing, take up his musical instrument, his stand 
and candle, and go out. Thus one after another 
ceased and departed, the music growing fainter, the 
lights dimmer, until at last Hayden the master was 
left alone. Then, taking his stand and his leader's 
baton, he too went silently off the stage. 

My friends, the hour has not yet come for the fare- 
well symphony of the religious life to be played. And 
it will never come. The hour cometh, and still is, 
when we may worship the Father in Spirit and in 
truth — in truth — with the homage of entire sincerity, 
and the allegiance of honest minds and undimmed 
vision. It is not opportune for any man to take his 
light and his instrument and depart. It is time rather 
to complete the ranks, to fill every empty chair in the 
orchestra, and to become eager and jubilant partici- 
pants in the triumphal march which shall voice the 
hopes, the aspirations, and the dreams of every human 
heart. 



THREE MARKS OF ESSENTIAL 
CHRISTIANITY 



"Upon this rock I will build my church 
and the gates of hell shall not prevail 
against it." — Matthew 16:18. 



XII 

THREE MARKS OF ESSENTIAL 
CHRISTIANITY 

While some of you have been wandering this sum- 
mer through various lands and cities of the Old World, 
I found a brief opportunity to observe, at closer range 
than commonly, a little portion of the Old World still 
surviving here on the frontier of the New World. The 
city of Montreal, only less quaint and ancient than her 
sister-city of Quebec, is still full of the monuments of 
that master-religion of authority which dominated the 
life of Europe for more than a thousand years and is 
still dominant wherever the Latin races thrive. 
Immensely interesting and prosperous and thronged 
are the cathedrals of Montreal. Schools, convents, col- 
leges occupying every prominent and desirable location; 
processions of nuns; processions of parochial children; 
quaint-garbed priests at every turn, in evidence every- 
where. The casual visitor is made to feel the tremen- 
dous impressiveness of these visible tokens of religious 
authority. And when you stand within the cathedral 
on the open square which is in form and detail a repro- 
duction of St. Peter's, you feel for a moment as 
though Rome herself, with all her subtle splendor and 
embodied power, had been transferred to the New 
World. Here are the same familiar features of the 
Renaissance architecture which marked the period and 
the work of Michael Angelo; here, under the great 

191 



192 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

dome, the same altar with its somber, twisted columns 
supporting the canopy; and there over your head, 
around the base of the dome, the same Latin inscrip- 
tion — those warm, personal, affectionate words of 
Jesus spoken to an impulsive disciple, and which have 
been crystallized into a warrant of eternal authority 
through these twenty hundred years : "Thou art Peter, 
and upon this rock I will build my church, and the 
gates of hell (the massive portals of the underworld) 
shall not prevail against it." 

This has been the warrant and weapon of a religion 
of authority which has cowed men or rallied them, 
commanded or inspired them, in turn. And as you 
wander through the ancient streets of the city you 
wonder that anything could arise in human life power- 
ful or persuasive enough to prevail against these vis- 
ible emblems of strength, this authority incarnate in 
massive piles of stone, appealing everywhere to the 
eyes and the imagination, rooted firmly in every insti- 
tutional growth, perpetuating the memory of its saints 
in the very names of its streets. You get a fresh im- 
pression of the sheer momentum of an authority- 
religion which has succeeded in finding an incarnation 
for itself in those forms which mold a people's life. 
And for a moment, as you stand there dominated by 
the might of it all, you almost assent to the old words 
in the sense which the church has read into them, and 
you exclaim: "The gates of hell shall not prevail 
against it; the tides of civilization shall not crumble 
it ; the devouring inroads of freedom, of research, of 



MARKS OF ESSENTIAL CHRISTIANITY 193 

doubt, shall not encroach upon its integrity and its 
adamantine security." 

But once you are away from this visible appear- 
ance of power, this impression of an unclimmed vital- 
ity; once you are across the frontier, and set down in 
the midst of a civilization which was decreed to be a 
Saxon and not a Latin civilization on the day when 
the tide of battle turned against Montcalm on the 
heights of Quebec, you find yourself facing a different 
situation and occupied with untangling the knot of 
another problem entirely. For the forces which were 
set in motion by Columbus and Luther, by Copernicus 
and Gutenberg — the forces which embody man's new 
sense of the greatness of the world, and the release of 
every human power — these have combined to create 
conditions with which the gray, massive cathedrals of 
neither the Old World nor the New can cope. A 
religion of mere authority cannot permanently sur- 
vive in a civilization dominated by personal prowess, 
by intellectual freedom, by political democracy. And 
it is these forces of prowess, of freedom, and of 
democracy which have conquered and transformed 
the modern world, which have built up our commerce 
and industry, our science and art, our governments 
and our politics, and which have, at the same time, 
seemed to leave the influence and authority of religion 
stranded upon a shore from which the tide has ebbed. 
How astounding it would seem today in any free 
Saxon land for an ecclesiastic to demand, what was 
demanded of Galileo, the recantation of a scientific 



194 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

opinion! How impossible for a churchman to dictate 
the fate of empire and the course of governmental 
history, as Hildebrand, a thousand years ago, dictated 
to Emperor Henry ! How insignificant is the growing 
revolt against a merely ecclesiastical regulation of 
even such a question as divorce, and the sentiment that 
marriage, with all its seriousness and import, stands 
sanctioned before a tribunal which underlies the tri- 
bunal of the church! How steadily and surely the 
state has separated itself from the church, so that, 
whereas our ancient universities, our Harvards and 
Yales, were founded in the piety of the fathers who 
looked upon these institutions primarily as feeders ot 
the church, now everywhere the university springs up 
as a part and parcel of the educational system of every 
state, not only independent of the church, but ofttimes 
looking at it somewhat askance ! 

It has come to pass, therefore, that instead of 
great, gray cathedrals, standing as the impregnable, 
citadels of a spiritual authority, the visible witness 
that the gates of hell cannot prevail against it, we 
have great gray piles of embodied commerce, or great 
gray piles which stand for intellectual freedom and 
fearless research — everywhere the evidence of activity, 
of courage, of awakened power. And, in the midst 
of it all, the church, which seemed so impregnable and 
so mighty, appears shattered and palsied and speech- 
less. Men do not hesitate to say that religion has lost 
its authority. Its voice is not heeded. Its appeals do 
not stir. It is a time aptly described by that signifi- 



MARKS OF ESSENTIAL CHRISTIANITY 195 

cant title of one of Wagner's music-dramas, the Goi- 
ter d'&mmerung: it is the "twilight of the gods," the 
dusk of faith. 

It behooves us then, who represent religion, who 
still believe in its real power and supremacy, to ask 
ourselves in what sense these gathering impressions arc 
true. And we are privileged to ask the question, not 
as defenders of an authority-religion, but from the 
vantage-ground of those who recognize the claims of 
intellectual freedom, and who have faith in democratic 
ideals, faith in man and his progress. From this 
vantage-ground, have we the right and privilege of 
inscribing upon the base of our own dome, in letters 
of light, the words in the old cathedral : "Upon this 
rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell 
shall not prevail against it?" 

We have that right. We may claim that confi- 
dence. And, as time goes on, I am sure we shall more 
clearly see the meaning and the ground for such a 
claim. 

And today I want to indicate in barest outline 
three reasons — three paths which converge toward just 
this triumphant and invincible conclusion. And if we 
brush from our eyes the whole spectacle of ecclesiasti- 
cal pagentry and power, if we put out of mind for the 
time being all the familiar and ordinary ways we 
have of measuring the influences and growth of the 
church, we shall be able without difficulty to follow 
these paths and discover their goal. 

Let us be concerned now only with this one in- 



196 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

quiry: On what kind of rock was Jesus in reality 
building? What is it that makes his faith and his 
way of life impregnable, certain of the future, certain 
of all time ? 

First of all, and perhaps the most important of all. 
Jesus built upon the value of the person — the worth 
of a man to himself because he had worth in the eyes 
of God. Jesus called it the value of the soul. He 
asked: "What shall a man give in exchange for his 
soul ?" And through long years of fruitful history his 
followers have labored for the salvation of the souls of 
men. They have been ofttimes too forgetful and too 
ignorant of the way the soul "wakes and grows," 01 
its genesis in all the intricate organism of the body, 
and all its necessary attachment to this present world ; 
but they have laid stress upon something in man which 
had priceless and imperishable value. It was his soul. 
We have come now — with wider comprehension, let 
us hope — to speak of this precious and imperishable 
soul as the person, the whole man, all there is of him 
from his far-away origin in the whole race behind him, 
through his visible career, his actual contact with this 
living and real world, even into a realm beyond, 
toward which we all yet look with yearning and unac- 
customed eyes. 

Jesus built upon this sense of the sacredness of a 
man to himself — this conviction that there is in each 
human being something august and holy and imperish- 
able. He saw it, with hushed wonder, looking through 
the eyes of a little child; and he frankly recognized 



MARKS OF ESSENTIAL CHRISTIANITY 197 

it in the wistful, hungering face of the harlot. The 
pure in heart should see God, and the stained and soiled 
of heart should find the open door, and the way back 
to Him. He recognized this value of the person in 
the poor, toiling for their daily bread under the light 
of the sun ; and he beheld it in the face of the rich 
young ruler whom he loved. He started the personal 
life into movement and growth when Nicodemus, his 
twilight friend, came to see him; and he did the same 
thing in another way when Zaccheus, the publican, 
climbed up into the branches of the tree to see him 
pass. 

These things tell the whole story. They disclose 
the absolute impartiality and inclusiveness of the 
master-motive of Christ. You cannot say that Christ 
took sides with the rich against the poor, or with the 
poor against the rich; with the saint against the sin- 
ner, or the sinner against the saint; with the master 
against the slave, or the slave against the master ; with 
Jew against gentile, or gentile against Jew. You can 
indeed make a brief for almost any of these things by 
selecting isolated instances, but you cannot maintain 
that brief against the whole movement and spirit of 
Christ's life. He took sides with man against every 
oppressive force without, and against every threaten- 
ing influence within, which could defeat the man from 
becoming himself. He took sides with man against 
everything which threatened the wreck of manhood — 
everything which meant the loss of inward light. It 
was better for a man to be drowned in the depths of 



198 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

the sea than to oppress one of these little ones ; it was 
better for a man to pluck out one eye or to cut off a 
hand, and go into the kingdom of heaven maimed, 
than to go into hell with both eyes and both hands. 

Thus did he advocate man against his foes from 
without and his foes from within. The one thing in 
which he absolutely believed with unwavering faith 
was the value of a person to himself, the worth of 
this mysterious and elusive something which is myself, 
its worth to me and its worth to God. That is the 
adamantine rock on which the gospel of Jesus and the 
faith of Jesus is built. 

And by means of that faith we must learn to trace 
his influence upon the history of the world. Here is 
the path, and the footsteps of Jesus are imprinted on 
that path wherever in all subsequent time you find 
living in the hearts of men and burning in their desires 
this sense of the worth of a man to himself, and this 
antagonism to every foe which batters from without 
or creeps stealthily from within. 

The footprints of Jesus — those bleeding tracks — 
you will find them all down the roadway of time, where 
men have toiled and wept and suffered, and kept vigil 
or fought the battle hard, that somewhere this soul of 
human life might have new access to the light, new 
freedom to grow. It is the faith which has broken the 
shackle of the slave; which has heard the cry of the 
children; which has listened to the moaning of the 
poor ; which has thought more kindly toward the crimi- 
nal and the prisoner, been more considerate of the 



MARKS OF ESSENTIAL CHRISTIANITY 199 

erring — more wise and pitiful and forgiving in every 
way. It has created new problems of its own. It has 
counteracted, so the scientists tell us, nature's rough 
and ready way of eliminating the weak and the unfit; 
but it has listened to some voice which through all this 
time has seemed to be pleading for opportunity, for 
time, for patience, for love, so that what is of worth 
within each one of us may have chance to grow, room 
to come into the light, and a way up to the face of God. 
And wherever that power is kept alive; wherever 
men are vigilant against injustice and oppression; 
wherever they are quick and eager to open up a new 
path for men, there the way of Christ is impregnable 
and unassailed. And wherever, too, men are on watch 
against the subtle foes from within — not only the gross 
foes which start up out of the passions and appetites 
of the flesh, but those subtler foes which spring up out 
of our very respectability, our culture, our wealth and 
ease, making us forget that "the good is always the 
enemy of the best ;" wherever men, I say, are on watch 
against these subtler foes, and are opening up new 
paths for the growth of the person — that power which 
man has to drink from the wells of eternal life — there 
again the faith and the way of Jesus appear as the 
impregnable rock. And on this rock he builds his 
church. 

Let us hasten now to trace for a little way the 
second path. We have seen how Jesus recognized the 
value of the person. Let us now see how he also 



200 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

recognized the spiritual nature of the world in which 
he lived. 

It might be said, of course, at once that Jesus recog- 
nized the spiritual nature of the world in just the sense 
that most people of his time and nation recognized it; 
that it was not an uppermost question, not a problem 
in dispute, and that the problems which agitated the 
Greek mind for hundreds of years before Christ did 
not much occupy the Hebrew mind. We shall find, it 
may be said, that Jesus believed in a world above this 
terrestrial world, which was occupied by God and by 
angels, and that from that upper world divine power 
streamed into this in form of miracle and special inter- 
vention, and in answer to prayer. Probably Jesus did 
hold the views about the world which were commonly 
held by the men of his time. There is little reason to 
think otherwise. 

But here is the point of importance. It was not so 
much a theory of the universe that occupied the mind 
of Christ; not a formulation of its laws; not even a 
theodicy — an attempt to justify the ways of God to 
man; but it was a conviction of the divine reality. Ic 
was what Jeremy Taylor called, in his quaint phrase, 
"the practice of the presence of God." The essential 
difference, as I conceive, between Jesus' idea of prayer, 
for instance, and the idea of prayer as we may find it 
explained and defended in many a religious treatise, is 
that the latter is on the defensive. It stands or falls 
with some special theory of the world and the divine 
relation to it. Jesus' idea stands through all mutations 



MARKS OF ESSENTIAL CHRISTIANITY 201 

of thought and interpretation. For it is one of the 
ways by means of which a man lays claim to the larger 
potencies of his own life. It is one of his means of 
climbing. 

We are not particularly concerned, therefore, to 
learn whether the scientific opinions of Jesus did or 
did not accord with the ordinary science of his day 
What we are concerned with is to know whether he 
had a vision of reality, a convicton of an eternal love 
and life within and around all our life, which was a 
true vision — a conviction which would hold essentially 
through all time, and through all the mutations of 
opinion. 

Men who have called themselves religious have 
been scared, terribly scared and stampeded, in the 
various crises of opinion, when men have been busy 
revising their theories of the universe as they have 
approached it from the hither side. The really reli- 
gious men have never been scared. There was nothing 
to scare them. They could always say in the spirii 
of Tennyson's line : "If He thunder by law, the 
thunder is yet His voice." And "If we could see and 
hear, this Vision — were it not He?" I believe that 
Jesus would have loved that poem of Tennyson's. 
He would have said : "Yes, that is what I believed ; 
that is what I meant." 

Now, all things come to those who wait. And to 
those who have waited with expectancy and confi- 
dence it is no very great surprise to hear so many 
gathering voices hastening to assure us now that the 



202 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

world is spiritual in its very structure. The testi- 
mony comes from those who measure the stars and 
weigh the earth in their balances, and dissolve its ele- 
ments in their crucibles, or speed the subtle currents 
of the cloud and air to do the bidding of man. The 
testimony grows and swells toward the conclusion 
that the world about us is a spiritual world. That 
is, it is not the accidental and capricious play of 
mechanical forces which have no intelligence, no con- 
trolling purpose, no goal. It is a world which has 
meaning and movement and purpose — too vast and 
intricate to be grasped up iff even the largest of our 
formulas, but still a world about which we may say : 
It is rational, it is good, it reveals mind and it reveals 
love. What more can we want? And what less can 
the heart of man demand? And it was on this 
rock of faith in the spiritual constitution of the world 
that Jesus planted himself. And so long as that rock 
does not crumble, what is built upon it stands secure. 

In conclusion, I must only indicate the third direc- 
tion which Christ pointed out as a path of eternal 
security. He laid hold of the sense of righteousness 
in a man's life and built on it. He looked upon 
that sense of righteousness as a large and satisfy- 
ing reality. He made a beatitude in its honor, 
for he said : "Blessed are they which do hun- 
ger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be 
filled." And he was constantly directing men away 
from an arid and formal righteousness to something 



MARKS OF ESSENTIAL CHRISTIANITY 203 

that was alive, and seeking further growth. ''Your 
righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the 
scribes and Pharisees," he said. If human righteous- 
ness is like a perfectly cut, flawless diamond, you can 
hardly exceed it; for it is perfect of its kind. But if 
righteousness is like a seed, you can constantly exceed 
it ; for it grows and grows, and does not cease to grow 
until it bears fruit — and then the fruit is but a seed- 
receptacle for future growth. Jesus believed in a 
righteousness, and in a human capacity for righteous- 
ness, which was like a seed, and which could even 
destroy itself in order to find life. 

If, then, we can really grasp the meaning of this 
faith of Jesus in a righteousness which exceeded the 
formulated righteousness and the best ideals of the 
time, shall we not the better understand the religious 
significance of that righteousness which is constantly 
undoing the righteousness of every age — the righteous- 
ness which refuses to crystallize itself, but which grows 
to meet the capacity and the need of man's life? There 
are certain standards of individual righteousness 
which get established, and to which men come gradu- 
ally to conform. And then they discover that these 
individual standards are not enough, they must be 
exceeded. There is a social righteousness; there are 
standards which make new appeal because of new 
relations, bonds holding men together in ties which 
the individual standards may entirely overlook. 

That is why so many men are bewildered and 
utterly amazed today. They are being brought to 



204 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

judgment before standards of righteousness which 
they have not as yet recognized. They regard them- 
selves as righteous men. What laws have they broken ? 
What codes have they ignored ? None, perhaps. Only 
this — they have not exceeded that familiar righteous- 
ness. They are righteous men upon the lower plane; 
but they are not righteous men upon the higher plane. 
And it is part of the necessary and clarifying process 
of every age to establish these higher claims and to 
lift the whole body of mankind to a new level. That 
is distinctly the process through which the world is 
going at this present time. We are meeting the dis- 
closure of new tests, and being made to feel the strain 
and pull to new heights. And the kingdom of heaven 
waits for those who can, at whatever cost, find the 
way to exceed the righteousness by which they have 
been righteous hitherto. 

Here, then, let us pause and come back to the ques- 
tion where we began : Is there an ideal, and invisible, 
and enduring church of Christ, against which the mas- 
sive gates of the devouring underworld shall not pre- 
vail? Is there something in this world which can 
endure every wrack of time? Yes there is. But it 
rests not on an apostolate whose credentials are the 
miter and the keys. It rests not in the imposing pres- 
ence of cathedral fronts. It rests on man's power to 
hold bravely and loyally to a conviction of the imperish- 
able value of man, to the spiritual nature and vitality oi 
the world, and to an ever-enlarging ideal and practice 



MARKS OF ESSENTIAL CHRISTIANITY 205 

of righteousness, a response to every motive and way 
which will enable a man to grow toward the stature 
of God. 

If we can hold to these three things at least, we 
have a way of life that is worth while. We have a 
motive for living which can give quickening and 
inspiration. And in every form and type of its organ- 
ized expression we have a church — a church against 
which nothing in this world or in any world can prevail. 



THE COMPASSIONATE GOD 



"Thou, O Lord, art a God full of com- 
passion and gracious, long-suffering 
and plenteous in mercy and truth." — 
Psalm 86:15. 



XIII 
THE COMPASSIONATE GOD 

There is doubtless no word or phrase, not a noun 
or adjective, of this noble affirmation which has not 
long since become an accepted conviction of all en- 
lightened men. It voices our common worship. We 
recite its words unheeding their content. We take it 
for granted that it is true. 

But there must have been a time, long since, when 
such an affirmation came as a surprise — perhaps a 
blinding light, as when the sun strikes through a rift 
of threatening cloud. Human history did not begin 
here. Primitive religion could not have envisaged 
such a thought of God. And had primeval man tried 
to say "Amen" to this sublime conviction his "Amen," 
like Macbeth's, would have stuck in his throat. 

There are, in fact, two strata of intervening cloud- 
belts through which this shaft of light cuts its way. 
There is, first, the early identification of God with the 
dark, grim forces of nature, which made him seem 
terrible — an implacable and angry foe lurking in am- 
bush, ready to spring forth in the lightning and 
tempest, to strike down in the pestilence, or to crush 
under the paw of the wild beast of the forest. The 
primitive fear of the natural world, of its unexplored 
and misunderstood forces, was at the same time a ter- 
ror and a fear of God. 

With increasing knowledge and experience this 
209 



210 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

terror was dissipated. Slowly there was developed a 
human confidence in the natural order which was able 
to produce such a poem as the ninety-first psalm. I 
say "developed," because any idea of inspiration which 
means anything real and solid implies, at the earth-end 
of things, not an inspired water-jug, nor an inspired 
graphophone, nor an inspired stock-market ticker, but 
an inspired man — a man whose eyes have become 
accustomed to living in a wider effulgence of that light 
in which we all see light. So at length there came a 
day when some man brushed the mist from his eyes, 
looked forth on this scene around him, dipped his pen 
in ink, and wrote : "Thou shalt not be afraid for the 
terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; 
nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness ; nor for 
the destruction that wasteth at noonday. There shall 
no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh 
thy dwelling." 

Now, as a sublime religious affirmation this stands 
the test of time. For it does not mean, in any rational 
view of the matter, that, by virtue of abiding under 
the shadow of the Almighty, a man may cease to be 
the mark of the natural forces. It does not mean that 
a good man may not, equally with an evil man, be 
struck down by the lightning, crushed in the wreck 
of trains, drowned in the sea, become the victim of 
disease, succumb to the slow dissolution of age, go at 
length with the long procession of mankind into the 
common grave. But it means that man has ceasea 
forever to associate God with these experiences as a 



THE COMPASSIONATE GOD 211 

malignant and vengeful cause. Man may be willing 
to postpone the explanation of these bewildering 
mysteries of life, lay them on the table, wait for a 
wider range of fact and experience before he even 
tries to resolve the mystery; but he cannot wait that 
long to come to some conclusion regarding the inner 
meaning and movement of life. He must somehow 
find standing-ground for himself, a conviction that 
there is a goal, and that the goal is good, and that some 
mighty embodiment of wisdom and of patient love, 
stands there within the shadow keeping watch above 
his own. And the religious faith of mankind has long 
since hewn its way out to that conviction. It has pene- 
trated that somber stratum of low-lying cloud. 

But there is still another stratum of cloud through 
which this search-light pierces. It pierces the concep- 
tion of a legal God ; and the legal God was largely the 
creation of the later Hebrew mind. There was built 
up the conception of a God of commandment and 
statute; a Being bent on undeviating justice, too pure 
to behold iniquity, too strict to condone it ; a God who 
was at once a Puritan and a martinet. 

Now, taking the Old Testament as a whole, we 
shall naturally find more allusions to a legal God than 
to a human, compassionate God, plenteous in mercy 
and grace. Correspondingly, we shall find the legal- 
istic portrayal of religion and piety. We see the legal- 
istic man in all his priggish pride, his condescension, 
his aloofness from the common herd. And we find 
this legalistic type of. piety embalmed in that literature 



212 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

of the Old Testament which lays supreme stress on 
shunning the company of the unrighteous, thinks much 
of one's formal rectitude, and meditates on the law of 
the Lord day and night. The product of this legal type 
was the conscious formalist who was not averse to 
viewing himself as a tree planted by the rivers of 
water bringing forth his fruit in his season. 

Then, later on, when the sense of oppression became 
great and the desire for political deliverance grew to 
be a determining motive, and the pharisaic cult had 
become established, the legal conscience in its most 
scrupulous type was in the ascendent. And the 
necessity of yielding painstaking obedience to the com- 
mandments of an exacting God became the profession 
of the technically pious, and the exasperation of every- 
one else. 

Somewhere through this murky bank of legalism 
there came glimmering the suspicion that God, after 
all, might be a human God — a God touched with a 
feeling for man's infirmities, a Being who remembered 
our frames that we are dust, even if he remembered 
the spark of light within those frames which no dust 
could quench. Here and there was heard a voice which 
dared to utter more and more boldly this suspicion that 
God was not all wrapped about with the cords of law, 
of commandment, of rigid and exacting precepts; that 
there was something in his being, just as there was 
evidently something in the world and in the nature of 
man, which made allowance for growth, which gave 
some play back and forth, furnished some easement 



THE COMPASSIONATE GOD 213 

from friction and strain, and had compassionate regard 
for the very difficulty of the task which he had himself 
imposed; just as you, when you send your little child 
to school to be drilled in mathematics, to master the 
intricacies of language, will have some tender feeling 
for the tears that start in the troubled eyes when 
numbers seem so rebellious, and geography so queer, 
and the spelling of one's mother-tongue so unaccount- 
ably baffling. You will respect the tears, and you will 
hug the child a little closer, even though you know that 
he must keep on the thorny way, and conquer and learn. 

So in this far-off time there was here and there one 
who began to see that God might be like that — that he, 
too, in his great majesty, might respect the tears of 
man, and that the everlasting arms would be beneath 
him, as he went on his difficult and dutiful way. To 
see this clearly would deliver God forever from being 
a martinet, and would save man from being a religious 
prig. So here and there in the Old Testament it flashes 
out just as it does in our text for today: "Thou, O 
Lord, art a God full of compassion and gracious, long- 
suffering and plenteous in mercy and truth." 

Now, somehow it seems that this gleam of light 
flashed and disappeared — just as sometimes on the 
coast you will see the quick, vivid flash from the light- 
house, and then darkness, and you wait a long time 
for the light to come again. And sometimes it will 
happen that, as you wait in suspense, there will come, 
not the flash of white, but a flash of red — alternating 
white and red. And that is what happened in this 



214 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

strange doubting and believing nation, with its alterna- 
tions of prophets' insight and scribes' legalism. When 
you looked for the light to flash again, it flashed red 
— and behold, the regime of the scribe and Pharisee 
was on in full control. And when that master-prophet 
of Nazareth arose, legalism was at its height. Every- 
where were men boasting that they were righteous, 
because they kept the law ; everywhere men despairing, 
because they had not kept it, and because they could 
not keep it. Everywhere were teachers refining upon 
the commandments, making them minute and detailed, 
and insisting that they all be kept. And everywhere 
were patient pupils — the common - people drudging 
along the common life, who were bearing a yoke that 
did not fit, and a burden of outward and mechanical 
duties which was a heavy load. And when one day 
there came the tones of a calm, courageous voice, say- 
ing, "Come unto me, and I will give you rest, for my 
yoke is easy and my burden is light," men knew, if 
they were in the least wise, that this forgotten chapter 
of ancient prophetic insight had been opened anew. 

And this is what I would have you chiefly remem- 
ber today, as we are met here again in the presence of 
these ancient symbols of the broken body and the out- 
poured blood of this Nazarene prophet. What I would 
wish you most to remember is that that far-off Cross 
signifies, not the bearing of the actual sins of man- 
kind by some mysterious transfer to the head of Jesus, 
or a substitutionary assumption on his part of a law 
transgressed, which must be made good in the eyes of 



THE COMPASSIONATE GOD 215 

infinite justice. That Cross stands rather as the inevi- 
table outcome for one who, in a legal age, dared to 
affirm a human God ; who, in a time when men's eyes 
were turned as never before to justice and command- 
ment and law, reaffirmed the conviction, of which even 
an earlier age had caught some glimpses, that God, so 
far from needing satisfaction to a sense of justice, or 
insisting upon the full meed of a law transgressed, was 
already and eternally, in his own attitude to every man 
in the world, taking account of human frailty, dis- 
counting at the start the stumblings of the struggle 
upward, moving along through every man's life with 
him, in patience, in loving-kindness, chiding and help- 
ing, anon leaving him to himself and anon holding 
him up, as the mother eagle, teaching the eaglets to 
fly, drops from under them and then swoops back to 
prevent their fall to earth. 

Jesus did not die to bear your sins and mine, in 
some legal and forensic and theological sense. He died 
because he had the wisdom and courage and faith to 
reaffirm this lost truth, that God is always going on 
with man, bearing his sins with him, keeping faith, in 
all patience and long-suffering, with his half-grown 
child. 

Why did Jesus go to the cross? Let us face that 
question as an immediate and practical question of the 
situation which developed around him. Why did he go 
to the cross? Here is one reason: He went to the 
cross for daring to teach the parable of the Prodigal 
Son. That is one count in the indictment. Have you 



216 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

ever thought of that? And of how directly the impli- 
cation of that parable ran counter to all the legalism of 
the time? How it implied a God just like this God of 
the old psalm — only better, more faithful, more patient, 
more remembering. And have you ever thought how 
the older son perfectly described the legalism of the 
day, with its stay-at-home routine, its abiding in the 
field, its ability to say: "Lo, these many years do I 
serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy com- 
mandment;" and of how Jesus set all this quietly aside, 
taking it for granted, but affirming only the larger, 
more comprehensive thing: "It was meet that we 
should make merry and be glad; for this thy brother 
was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found" ? 
Shall we ask the question again : "Why did Jesub 
go to the cross?" He went to the cross because he 
dared to publish a new commandment — the command- 
ment to love one another. And the commandment to 
love is no commandment at all. It is really the satire 
and negation of commandment. For love is simply 
the resolute determination to live in fellowship with all 
human beings who, like ourselves, are in the making, 
capable of rising or falling, capable of heights of good 
and depths of baseness. Love is the simple and glad 
acceptance of our human comradeship, conditioned, as 
it is, by all the law of struggle and of growth. In this 
power of man to love, according to Jesus, lay his 
redemption ; but, according to the scribes, his redemp- 
tion lay in his power to conform his life to an exacting 
standard and code. 



THE COMPASSIONATE GOD 217 

We might easily multiply the illustrations which 
would successively confirm the difference between the 
master-motive of Jesus and the master-motive of the 
legalism of his time. And it would be clear that each 
difference, as it emerged, did but drive another nail 
into the cross upon which at last he should bear 
supreme witness to the faith that was in him. 

And that faith — this is what we now wish chiefly 
to emphasize — that faith was not the conviction that 
God was waiting to have some claim vindicated, some 
law satisfied, some anger appeased; but the faith, 
rather, that the only God there was, or had ever been, 
in the world was the God who, step by step and hour 
by hour, was a part of this whole long process of his- 
tory, and this tumultuous procession of human hearts 
which he had himself set moving and beating. He saw 
God there in the process, a part of all its awful but 
glorious meaning — now like the conqueror coming 
from Edom with garments dyed red in the conflict, 
and now like the good shepherd tending his troubled 
flock and giving to every weary lamb the gift of rest. 
Jesus did not make God compassionate; he did not do 
anything to make him gracious and merciful and for- 
giving. He saw that he was all these things, had been 
them eternally, and must be them through all eternity 
to come. He saw, and believed, and published it as a 
gospel — and died, leaving to all men the truth, to grow 
through all time more clear, that "the All-Great is the 
All-Loving too" : 



218 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

So through the thunder comes a human voice, 
Saying, "O heart I made, a heart beats here ! 
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself ! 
Thou hast no power, nor may'st conceive of mine, 
But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 
And thou must love me who have died for thee." 

And now, before we leave the thought, let us stop 
a moment to ponder what it means, what indeed it 
might mean, to have this conception of God and this 
faith in him become vitally operative, the controlling 
motive of our lives' This is indeed really the test of 
it all. 

To believe that God is compassionate and gracious 
means, of course, that we must gradually become com- 
passionate and gracious men. To have faith in the 
Eternal as long-suffering and plenteous in mercy means 
that the master-motives of human life are to be these 
motives of patient hope, of merciful forbearance,, of 
large-mindedness — the magnanimity of the Greek sages 
— and large-heartedness, of which Jesus is himself the 
chief exponent. It is the motive which Paul expressed 
in his great, impulsive, affectionate way : "Be ye kind 
one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, 
even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you." 

The very moment such counsel becomes a motive of 
life, on a plane which is above amiable sentimentality, 
we see clearly that it means the kind of love which 
grows out of the resolute desire for fellowship, the 
choice of comradeship with one another in all our 
human destiny, taking each other just as we are, for 
richer for poorer, for better for worse, till death us 
do part. 



THE COMPASSIONATE GOD 219 

And to live in the spirit of that motive, in the vari- 
ous circles of our human comradeship and intimacy, 
means that we discount at the start, just as God dis- 
counts, the fact of human frailty and weakness and 
imperfection. We are not thrown into the comradship 
of paragons and prigs and statuettes. We are thrown 
into a human comradeship — the great blessed com- 
pany of fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons 
and daughters, friends, neighbors, and citizens ; and to 
believe in an eternally compassionate God is to have 
the growing power to be patient and tolerant and great- 
hearted when the fault comes; when the spirit, not yet 
duly curbed, breaks its leash ; when the less lovely thing, 
which we have discounted at the start and know all 
about, becomes for the moment ascendent. The ugly 
trait, the evanescent flash of anger, the surly mood, for 
the moment in the ascendent, easily seem the dominant 
quality of life, making us grow bitter and disappointed 
and hard of heart, unless we discount these things, as 
God does, and recognize in them the brute inheritance 
not yet thrown off; and then recognize, as ascendent, 
the better forces which will come into ascendency 
again. 

Is there any other way to live together in this 
human world ? Is there any other modus vivendi on the 
basis of which there may be a comradeship in joy and 
blessedness and peace? 

All, I could never be, 
All, men ignored in me, 
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. 



220 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

And the recognition of this worth in one another, 
this potential value notwithstanding "the flaws that 
lurk" and the "warpings past the aim," is the only real 
fulfilment of the new commandment that we love one 
another. 

Shall we not, then, be inspired by some clear vision 
of what the eternal God ever was and is — a God of 
compassion, gracious and plenteous in mercy; and by 
some new resolve to make that vision, as Jesus did, a 
controlling motive in the shaping of our human fellow- 
ship, and of the daily life. 



THE HIDDEN GOD 



"Verily, Thou art a God that hidest 
Thyself." — Isaiah 45 : 15. 



XIV 
THE HIDDEN GOD 

In the current number of one of the leading maga- 
zines there is a pleasing and humorous sketch which 
represents Zeus, the father of gods and men, and the 
creator of the world, as standing on a bank of fleecy 
cloud. At his feet lies a sphere, representing the planet 
earth, on which are traced the outlines of the western 
continent. In his hands he holds a golf-club, swung 
back for a splendid drive. Near by stands Hermes, 
with winged feet and in attentive mood — the inevi- 
table selection for celestial caddy. At the remoter edge 
of the billowy cloud is grouped a respectful and atten- 
tive gallery of gods and goddesses ; and as Zeus pre- 
pares to send the planet whizzing forward into space, 
he thoughtfully calls out: "Fore, fore!" It is the 
ancient story of creation in terms of a modern pas- 
time — a pleasing conceit, happily executed, and serious 
enough to set one thinking. 

Is the world in any sense outside of God and 
detached from him, as this picturesque conceit repre- 
sents? Did God create the world as a potter creates 
the pitcher on the wheel, as the spinner weaves the 
fabric in the loom, or as the refiner refines the silver 
in the crucible ? Is there a point quickly reached where 
all these suggestive metaphors cease to suggest and 
be true ? In his gruff way, Carlyle once said that most 
men think of God as having set the world a-going, and 

223 



224 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

as then having retired to watch it go, remaining, after- 
ward, an absentee God. Is that a true description of 
the popular belief? Is that the way in which you 
think of God, of his creative relation to the world, 
and of his present control of it? These are some of 
the questions that come to mind, which we may profit- 
ably consider today, trying to keep ourselves in the 
practical rather than the speculative frame of mind. 

Our religious ideas are almost inevitably tied up 
with general ideas about the world — our astronomy 
and geography, our ideas of space and time. If we 
need any proof of that, we may turn at once to the first 
chapter of the first book of the Old Testament. Pri- 
marily and profoundly the Old Testament is a religious 
book, a treasure-house of spiritual uplift and inspira- 
tion. But the very first word in it ventures into the 
field of science : it sets forth a cosmogony ; it tells us 
how God made the world and how he populated the 
earth — and it does all this in the only imagery and by 
means of the only machinery possible to men of old 
time. 

The picture before the mind is perfectly simple. 
Draw two parallel lines and you have all the diagram 
needed. Between those lines is the world of nature and 
of man, the earth inhabited by the nations and races 
of mankind. Above the upper line, that hard and solid 
firmament, is the upper-world, the dwelling place of 
God. and his angels and ministers. It is the super- 
natural world. Below the lower line is the under- 
world, the Sheol of the Hebrews, the Hades of the 



THE HIDDEN* GOD • 225 

Greeks. It is the world of the dead, the place where 
shades wander, the realm of darkness and gloom. 

Around so simple a scheme as this did the thought 
of the ancient world revolve. Around it as a nucleus 
did their religious convictions crystallize. The religion 
of all mankind has been domesticated in a world which 
has a firmament and a Sheol — an upper and an under ; 
which has certain beings who are supernatural, cer- 
tain others who are natural. All that has been quick 
and spontaneous and enthusiastic in the religious faith 
and activity of mankind has grown out of these pre- 
suppositions. The world — the upper-world and the 
under-world — what mighty and convincing part it 
has played in the religious faith and destiny of all 
mankind ! And how true it is that, although we now 
live in a world, and the most of us know that we live 
in a world, which cannot be diagrammed in this sim- 
ple and expeditious way. as upper and under, natural 
and supernatural, yet the sheer momentum of religious 
ideas started in that conception of the world carries 
us by. We have a religious nomenclature, therefore, 
which does not belong to the world in which we now 
know ourselves to live. 

Some of the great poets of our day, however — 
indeed, all the greater poets — are helping us to re- 
establish ourselves spiritually in the world which has 
grown so great and boundless as time has moved on. 
The poets are always the first ''to feel after God if 
haply he may be found." That is why they are often 
better theologians than the theologians themselves. 



226 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

And the same thing was true of the poets of ancient 
times. They were not so much intent on diagram- 
ming the world, and getting the system of thought 
right, as they were on giving voice to the heart and 
the imagination, making effective those great ideals 
and realities which surge through our life. You can 
hardly get enough bricks out of the psalms to build a 
theological house ; but you can get better than bricks — 
you can get fire for your altar, and light for the candle 
of your soul. 

It is, then, a truth of poetry, a voice of the imagina- 
tion and the heart which speaks in these words of 
Isaiah, who was a poet himself : "Verily, thou art 2 
God who hidest thyself." I hardly venture to say pre- 
cisely what he meant, except that he seems to be speak- 
ing with satisfaction and pleasure. He is glad to believe 
that God does hide himself. Therefore he must have 
had a different thought in mind from that of many of 
the Hebrew writers who speak in dread of God's hid- 
ing his face from men. That is a very common picture 
in the Old Testament. And I suppose it must have been 
suggested by the habit of drawing the loose fold of 
the outer garment about the face when one was afraid 
or ashamed, or when he wished to show dislike of 
another. 

How easily one could hide his face within his robe! 
How much it suggests of fear, of aversion, of hostility. 
And men prayed to God that he would not hide his 
face from them. To them the storm and tempest 
seemed a frown of God. The pestilence and the earth- 



THE HIDDEN GOD 227 

quake, disease and death, the oppression of the enemy, 
the invasion of earthly misfortune and loss, seemed the 
hiding of his face. They prayed for the clear light of 
the divine countenance, and for the smile on the face 
of God. 

But Isaiah takes it for granted that it is the very 
nature of God to hide himself. Therefore his meta- 
phor was moving in another order of thought : he was 
anticipating, by one of those first flushes of the dawn, 
a truth which is fast becoming a master-truth ; an idea 
supreme in our poetry, in our science, in our philoso- 
phy, and which waits to become supreme also in our 
religious faith; a conviction out of which shall come 
spiritual vitality, such as came when men believed with 
all their hearts in an upper- and an under-world. 

Let us then take this thought of Isaiah and try to 
follow it for a little way as an Ariadne thread through 
some of the labyrinths that have puzzled men. 

We may well begin with this remote idea of the 
creation of the world, the creation of life. Had we 
been there "in the beginning," as the writer of Gene- 
sis calls it, what might we have witnessed ? Well, who 
can say? Only that it would not have been anything 
like the picture of Zeus sending the planet scuttling 
from the end of his club ; nothing like the potter shap- 
ing the pitcher on his wheel; nothing like the weaver 
weaving the pattern in his loom. We should not have 
seen or heard God, had we been there "in the begin- 
ning." He was then, as ever since, a God who hides 
himself. 



228 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

Every once in a while, when we pick up the morn- 
ing paper to see what is doing in Russia or Cuba or 
Washington, we are confronted with startling head- 
lines and staccato sentences to the effect that some dis- 
tinguished savant is at last on the point of creating 
life, doing it de novo, and out of hand. I do not know 
why it is the newspapers periodically get so hysterical, 
and try to get other people agitated over what is not 
the least bit exciting, if one has a grain of wisdom and 
sanity in his constitution. To create something that 
lives, by a happy combination of salts and acids, is 
hardly more wonderful than the power to set the heart 
a-beating after it seems to have grown silent forever — 
and that is what men of science are doing now. Bui 
even to create life, or actually to do the bold thing of 
setting a little world going on one's own account — 
what does it tell us as to the real origin of all these 
forces and elements that once came to be what they are ? 
What does it tell us as to a thinking, brooding mind 
which first thought of putting things together and 
making them live? What does it tell us as to the 
majestic sweep of things, the march of life, the head- 
ing of things toward a goal ? What does it really tell 
us as to life itself? If a man, possessed of reasoning 
and reflecting power, can trace the movement of life 
backward, laying bare its process step by step until he 
reaches the unit of life, and discovers there a simple 
chemical union of certain elements which he is able 
himself to combine in his laboratory, what does that 
skill and wisdom really make emphatic? It emphasizes 



THE HIDDEN GOD 229 

nothing so much, I should judge, as that there had 
also been mind and reason and purpose in the forward 
movement which is now traced backward, in the syn- 
thetic building-up of a world which is now laid bare 
by a process of experiment and analysis; that the 
world, as we see it and know it and have it, is the 
embodiment of thought commensurate to the under- 
taking and the result. The real demand of the reli- 
gious instinct is not for a God who once did something 
which man cannot possibly analyze or imitate in his 
laboratory, but the demand that He, the Thinker, was, 
and has ever been, in this world, which is His thought ; 
that He, the plotter of good, was in the world which 
shall prove itself good by having a goal and by reaching 
it, even though the day be far off. And yet in all this 
movement and process He has been the invisible, silent, 
hidden Source of life — as the psalmist called Him, 
"the fountain of life, the light in which we see light." 

In that splendid outburst of the prophet Isaiah 
which we have read again today for our Scripture les- 
son, we see the religious imagination taking flight, 
soaring into the empyrean, looking down with wither- 
ing satire on all the poor and weak idolatries of the 
people around him, endeavoring with one exclamation 
after another to find some term which will be a worthy 
description of the great God his own faith grasps. 
Noble as the passage is — and there are few nobler in 
the Bible — we yet realize how inadequate it is, how at 
best it can only throw out hints, leave some faint 
impression of the greatness of God who sits upon the 



230 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

circles of the earth, calls out the hosts of heaven by 
number, and whose understanding cannot be searched ; 
and come at the close to that point to which the reli- 
gious spirit always comes with something of the cer- 
tainty of experience, that "they who wait upon the 
Lord shall renew their strength." However the under- 
standing may falter in coming to a conception of the 
Almighty, the heart that waits upon him finds strength 
and inspiration and everlasting peace. Therefore, if 
we had been there "in the beginning," we doubtless 
should have seen no thundering Zeus sitting on the 
circles of the earth, issuing his commands and saying 
audibly, "Let there be light!" and, "Let the dry land 
appear!" and, "Let there be a firmament between 
heaven and earth!" We should have seen only what 
it has been given eyes to see since eyes were created; 
but the life, and the power, and the spirit within all 
this play of mechanism and matter would have been as 
it is now, invisible and silent. In that measureless 
time traced backward to the point where all the worlds 
began to be, he was still a God who was hiding him- 
self. He was in the process and the movement, and 
the march of things; but he was hidden in it all. God 
was in it, but you could not find him in it. You could 
not say when you had him, and when you had him 
not. 

But perhaps this approach to the subject is too 
large and vague. Possibly it makes you dizzy to stand 
on the circles of the earth and peer off into the min- 



THE HIDDEN GOD 231 

gling of chaos and cosmos. Let us take something more 
definite and tangible and small. 

Take a grain of wheat, a kernel of corn, an acorn 
dropped from the oak. In all these little particles there 
is the germ and potency of life. That one grain of 
wheat would in due time cover the wheat-fields of this 
western land. The acorn would ere long grow into a 
forest of oaks. Over yonder in the university they 
will tell you all there is to be known about these mar- 
velous little receptacles of life. Out on the farms, the 
farmer will tell you from the practical side how to turn 
them into life. He knows when to sow and to reap, 
how to prepare the soil, how to market the grain. 
From the side of botany and agriculture alike we know 
that the wonderful process of life, the fidelity of life to 
itself, is in the seed so inert and hard. But do we know 
where God is, in all the movement of this life? Can 
we put our hand upon him anywhere in the process? 
Is he the one who dwells above, making the furrows 
soft with rain when he is so inclined, sending the 
drought and the blight and the frost when that mood 
is upon him? That is too narrow and shallow a 
thought to entertain — too much like the God which 
Caliban hated and cajoled in turn. You remember 
what the Scotch farmer said when the crops were a 
failure and the dominie tried in mechanical fashion to 
reconcile him to Providence. He burst out with the 
exclamation : "I know all about Providence. It's 
Providence this and Providence that. I hate Provi- 
dence. But there's One above who will make things 



232 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

right in the end." It was the instinctive appeal to the 
over-God, the dumb instinct that oftentimes our con- 
ceptions of God are only a caricature of what he 
really is. 

No, we do not find God by looking for him as the 
dispenser of gifts and blessings from outside. As 
Job said : "He hideth himself on the right hand that 
I cannot see him ; on the left hand when he doth work, 
but I cannot behold him." We look for him outside 
the process and movement of life, rather than within it. 
He is in the life, hidden there, never stepping outside 
the life itself. He is not only in the life — he is the 
life; and wherever life is, there is he. 

"Thou art a God that hidest thyself" — astronomer, 
and biologist, and tiller of the soil might well all alike 
take this truth to heart, and grow reverent in the 
presence of the one Life that filleth all things with its 
activity and power. 

And now one step farther. I wish I knew how to 
speak in other than veiled parables and intimations 
concerning the relation of this truth to our human life 
— to the part we have as the bearers of life from gen- 
eration to generation; and to the absolute certainty 
that God is hidden too in all this process and mystery, 
even as he is hidden in the acorn and the wheat. 

Suppose there could dawn upon us some real and 
controlling sense of this hidden presence in our human 
relationships, and in the bond which guards the sacred 
mystery of the transmission of life — would it not be 



THE HIDDEN GOD 233 

something like a universal annunciation, such as that 
which the gospel narrative tells us came to Mary, the 
mother of Jesus, when the angel said to her: "The 
Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of 
the Most High shall overshadow thee; wherefore also 
that which is to be born of thee shall be called holy, 
the son of God?" Is not that one annunciation, in 
reality, the symbol and anticipation of a universal and 
eternal truth ? In a day when men were not ready for 
the universal truth they believed the partial truth. 
There grew up the belief in the virgin-birth and the 
immaculate conception. Purity and holiness were 
turned over to miracle. Men regarded that as unclean 
which God had made clean, and could not see that God 
was waiting to teach them that in the profoundest and 
holiest sense every life that struggles out into the light 
is conceived of the Holy Ghost, and that in the love 
and loyalty of human hearts there is the overshadow- 
ing of the Most High, and that forever more all 

Motherhood is priced 
Of God, at price no man may dare 
To lessen, or understand. 



Virginity eternal signed and sealed 
Upon all motherhood. 

We shall surely see in the end that nothing is gained 
for religion, nothing for the true nurture of the spirit, 
by putting God, his approaches and relations to us, 
into the exceptional, the unusual, the miraculous ; by 
thinking of the divine as there, and of the human as 



234 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

here. God will become of avail as a reality and inspira- 
tion, by our ability to think of him as the hidden pres- 
ence in all the laws, and functions, and relationships of 
our multiform life. And if the thought weighs us 
down with humility, so that we exclaim, "Lord, I am 
a man of unclean lips and not worthy to appear before 
thee," he will lift us up as he did the prophet and say 
to us again : "Son of man, stand upon thy feet that 
I may speak to thee." 

One word more. All this truth, with its impressiver 
ness and urgency, comes to a kind of climax in those 
words which you may already have anticipated. It is 
that significant moment when Jesus was talking with 
his disciples. And some word of his called out from one 
of them the eager exclamation, in which somehow the 
long anxious search of all human hearts is wrapped 
up: "Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." That 
exclamation voices the age-long doubt and the age- 
long faith of humanity. "Where is God? You cannot 
find him; you cannot prove that he is," cries the 
doubter. "Oh that I knew where I might find him," 
cries the believer. "Show us God, and that is enough," 
cry doubter and believer in one voice. 

And what is the answer of Christ ? "He that hath 
seen me hath seen the Father!" Let us not mistake 
the purport of that answer. Let us not turn the switch 
which shall sidetrack us once more into an age of 
scholasticism and dogma. Had men seen the Father 
in seeing Christ ? The only key that unlocks the won- 
der of that reply is the key Christ himself furnished 



THE HIDDEN GOD 235 

in varying terms — all of them, however, terms ot 
man's inward attitude to life : "He that doeth the will 
of God shall know the truth;" "If any man loveth he 
shall know God, for God is love." 

If we follow out the requirement of these direc- 
tions, we shall see God. But we shall not see him as 
one apart from the laws and forces and personalities 
in which he lives and works. We shall not see him 
as dissolved out from the process, and set apart as an 
absolute Deity. He is still a God that hideth him- 
self. He is in the process, as the mighty energy of 
life. He is in the will that chooses the good, as the 
mighty and eternal impulse toward the good. He 
is in the mind that loves the truth, fitting together 
for that mind, as it moves on, part by part the uni- 
verse itself, building up a rational order that is sane 
and whole. 

So, whether Christ actually applied to himself or 
not these terms of the Fourth Gospel which seem to 
have their roots in the soil of Greek ideas, it remains 
essentially true that those who have seen him have seen 
the Father — because they have seen a life which dared 
to trust the silent and hidden God, dared to believe that 
he was there, dared to make him visible and incarnate 
in all the common ways of life. He willed the good ; he 
bore witness to the truth ; he was pure in heart ; he 
counted nothing unclean which God had cleansed; he 
saw unfaith and treason to God only in that which 
worked havoc and ruin in these lives which were the 
temple of God. 



236 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

To Jesus himself, as to the first man Adam, and 
as to the last man who shall come forth from Adam's 
loins — to all alike, God is the one who hides himself. 
He is not in the earthquake or the tempest, but in the 
still, small voice. And it is that voice which Jesus 
heard — the voice whose tones we so easily miss, which 
whispers to us in all the laws and ways and relation- 
ships of life, which tells us that the thing which is true 
in us is true in him also, and which makes luminous to 
us those masterful words of Christ : "He that receiv- 
eth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiv- 
eth him that sent me." 



THE HOSPITALITY OF CHRISTIANITY 

AND THE MODIFICATIONS 

RESULTING 



"They shall come from the east, and 
from the west, and from the south, 
and shall sit down in the kingdom of 
God." — Luke 13:29. 



XV 

THE HOSPITALITY OF CHRISTIANITY AND 
THE MODIFICATIONS RESULTING 

It would be interesting to have a record of the 
unexpressed objections to some of the sweeping state- 
ments which Christ was in the habit of making. We 
can guess what the objectors would sometimes say. It 
is not difficult to guess in the present instance. They 
would have said : "We don't want them to come from 
the north and the east and the south and the west. 
We are perfectly content with our present constitu- 
ency. We are the religious 'four hundred.' We 
believe ourselves to be the hereditary people of God." 

Within a few days the newspapers have been tell- 
ing us that one of our enterprising merchants has been 
asked to supervise the establishment in London of a 
great modern American department store. The 
description of the plan discloses the fact that the greater 
number of London shopkeepers are not only confined 
to a limited patronage and relatively small establish- 
ments, but that they prefer this condition. They do 
not advertise their wares, because to do so would 
bring them more customers than they can serve. It 
would compel enlargement of plant, increase of stock 
and of the number of employees. In many instances 
these shopkeepers have a patronage which is not only 
stable, but hereditary. Certain families have traded 
with certain firms for generation upon generation. It 

2 39 



240 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

is a part of the tradition of English history, and the 
merchants have no disposition to enlarge their snug 
little incomes, or to increase the number of their reli- 
able and respectable patrons. In one view of the mat- 
ter, this reasonable contentment is quite refreshing; 
in another view, it is unprogressive, and certainly 
un-American. 

Now, Jesus found a religious situation in Judea not 
unlike the mercantile situation in London. He found 
an unprogressive, reactionary, and aristocratic super- 
vision of the religious institutions. There was a pe- 
dantic satisfaction, a racial pride, a zeal for national 
exclusiveness, a Zionism before the time of Zionism. 
To Christ this was narrow, contemptible, intolerable. 
And he told them so. He said to them: "Ye shall 
see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the proph- 
ets in the kingdom of God, and yourselves thrust out. 
But the middle wall of partition shall be broken down. 
The gates on the four sides of the city shall be swung 
back. And they shall come. From the east and the 
west, from the north and the south, they shall come 
and sit down in the kingdom of God." 

This confident outlook of Christ's suggests many 
things. But the one thing I am going to ask you to 
take note of today is the modifying effect that comes 
to us from enlarging our scope of life, our range of 
interests, of influence, and of fellowship. We cannot 
have all the gates of life open, hospitable to the streams 
of life from every point of the compass, without a 
profound modifying effect upon ourselves. 



THE HOSPITALITY OF CHRISTIANITY 241 

This, you will observe, is the opposite considera- 
tion to that which is most frequently forced upon our 
attention. It is, so to speak, the centripetal rather 
than the centrifugal influence we are now to consider. 
We more commonly emphasize the outgoing meaning 
of this enlargement of life. To break down the walls, 
to open the gates, to reach out toward all men and 
nations, to democratize and Christianize the world — 
this oftenest means to us merely the fulfilment of what 
we sometimes call the "great commission" embodied in 
the words of Christ: "Go ye into all the world and 
preach the gospel to every creature." This is the out- 
reaching, forthgiving, centrifugal force. 

But there is also, if we will but stop to note it, an 
influence all the time going on of the opposite kind. 
The enlargement of life and the universal point of 
view not only give us a chance to get our ideas and 
ideals lodged everywhere, but those ideas and ideals 
themselves get modified in the process. And this is 
something we do not always take account of, although 
Christ seemed to forecast this very thing in his com- 
panion-parable of the mustard seed and the leaven. 
The mustard seed is the parable of the outward, exten- 
sive, centrifugal growth. The kingdom of God is to 
fill the world. The leaven is the symbol of the inward, 
intensive, centripetal growth, where, when the leaven 
has done its work, it has pervaded the bread, but is 
itself modified in modifying the lump. 

It is then this inevitable, and at the same time 
desirable, modification of which I ask you now to take 



242 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

note. Not only do we change others, but we are 
changed ourselves by our contact with them, and by the 
general growth and progress of life. 

There is no better place to begin in seeking evidence 
for this statement than at the very threshold of Chris- 
tian history. What was the first great change which 
came to primitive Christianity? We all know, and 
yet perhaps we seldom measure the full significance of 
that change. We know that the apostle Paul insisted 
on carrying the gospel to the Graeco-Roman world, 
but we have certainly never overestimated the modify- 
ing influence which was exerted by that world. To 
the first disciples the gospel of Jesus was distinctly a 
form of Jewish messianism. They had no means of 
interpreting the message of Jesus except against the 
background of Jewish history, Jewish memories and 
prophecy. The Christian church was a reform move- 
ment within the Jewish church itself. They had 
broken with the rulers, but they had not broken with 
their national history or with their most sacred tra- 
ditions. All their hopes and expectations were bound 
up with the certainty of Christ's reappearance upon the 
soil of Palestine. He was the Prince of the House of 
David who should one day come to his own. 

What then happened ? The apostle Paul happened 
— the most significant personality, with the most revo- 
lutionary career in the first century of Christian his- 
tory. Paul's contention was that the gospel of Christ 
was not exclusively a Jewish gospel. It was a gospel 
for all men, all classes, and for every station of life. 



THE HOSPITALITY OF CHRISTIANITY 243 

There was no longer Jew or gentile, male or female, 
bond nor free; they were all one in Christ Jesus. The 
process by which he came to this conclusion, and the 
rabbinical theology by which he defended the con- 
clusion, do not greatly interest us today. But the fact 
interests us, and the sublime heroism with which he 
made the fact good against tremendous odds, and in 
the face of opposition from his Jewish-Christian com- 
rades, and of frequent misunderstanding from the citi- 
zens of the Graeco-Roman world. 

' But this is a part of the story on which we cannot 
linger. Here is our query : Was the gospel of Christ 
modified by its passage into the Greek and Roman 
world ? Did it in this passage lose its messianic color- 
ing and character ? It still bore the name of the gospel, 
and associated itself with the memory and influence of 
Jesus Christ; but did it, at the same time, become a 
different product, a message with a different mean- 
ing and direction ? 

I suppose that this question admits of only one 
answer. It is not a matter which is really in dispute. 
One who has followed only cursorily the early cen- 
turies of Christian history is perfectly aware that 
great and radical transformations were undergone. 

But this is the question which does even yet awaken 
controversy. Were these transformations desirable or 
necessary ? Did they mark a forward or a retrograde 
movement? W T as it the gospel of Jesus, or a travesty 
upon it, which bore its name, say from the third cen- 
tury onward ? 



244 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

To these questions you will get contrary answers. 
There are always in the world people of a literalistic 
turn of mind who insist that the only real Christianity 
is primitive Christianity. They find no place within 
it, and no warrant for any modification which implies 
change of form, method of appeal, or inclusion of a 
wider range of interests and ideals. To many of these 
people Christianity is still, if they only knew it, the 
Jewish messianism which it was at the start ; and with 
entire consistency of view many of them still anticipate 
the earthly reappearance of Christ. 

There is also a type of mind, of which Count Tol- 
stoi is the most conspicuous example, which inter- 
prets Christianity, not in the mystical, but in the ethical 
way, and to which Christian conduct must be the lit- 
eral, unmodified application of the exact precepts of 
Jesus. In the view of people of this type of mind, we 
are not Christians unless we do the things that Jesus 
did, obey in form the precepts which he inculcated, and 
walk with painstaking devotion in his footsteps. 

Now, I am sure we need not take the ground that 
everything is Christian which has taken place in Chris- 
tian history. We need not hold the perfectly inde- 
fensible citadel that every historic transformation of 
the gospel has given wider and fuller expression to 
what Paul called the mind of Christ. But with utmost 
emphasis we may take the ground that the great his- 
toric modifications are themselves a part of that eter- 
nal purpose sweeping the world onward into wider 
life. The mighty Will, the divine Intelligence, which 



THE HOSPITALITY OF CHRISTIANITY 245 

holds and guides the world, works within the charac- 
teristic expressions of life which come from different- 
ages, different races, and different men — so that those 
who come from the north and the east and the south 
and the west to sit down with Abraham and Jacob 
come not to serve them, or to acknowledge a Hebrew 
supremacy, but to make their contributions, and to 
bring their gifts, even as in the beautiful story of the 
gospels the Magi came bringing gold and frankincense 
and myrrh to the infant Christ. 

Think just a moment, then, of two profoundly 
modifying influences which came like leaven into this 
primitive Christian messianism, when once it was fully 
established in the Graeco-Roman world. At once the 
great Christian teachers began saying less about the 
messianic idea and more about the idea of incarnation. 
Now see what that means. The Jews had the idea of 
anointing or unction. That is what the name "Messiah" 
means : he is the anointed of God. And that describes 
the Hebrew idea of the way in which God communi- 
cates himself to the world. He must anoint a king and 
make him the authoritative bearer of divine power, 
therefore kings were anointed for their service. He 
must anoint a prophet, and make him the authoritative 
mouthpiece of the divine message ; therefore the proph- 
ets were frequently anointed for their task. He must 
anoint a priest to make him a fit medium of sacrifice 
and sacrament; therefore the priest was anointed for 
his holy work. The divine unction — that expresses the 
high-water mark of Hebrew religious thought. 



246 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

But the Greek had the idea of incarnation. And 
what does that mean? It means that God might 
actually dwell in human life and in earthly affairs. It 
was not an external anointing, but an inward presence. 
The spirit of God took possession of a man, not tty 
reason of a formal and official act which gave accredit- 
ing to his work or his message, but the real spirit which 
was everywhere in the world could be also in a man's 
life, shaping that life, giving the sense of freedom and 
of joy. This idea of incarnation was not a Hebrew 
idea. It was a Greek idea. The Hebrew writers spoke 
of theophanies and anointings ; the Greek writers spoke 
of the Logos, the word of God which could become 
flesh and dwell in human life. 

The influence of these modifying Greek ideas is 
disclosed even before the pages of the New Testament 
are closed. The Gospel of John and a few of the 
epistles are pervaded with ideas and expressions which 
Abraham and Isaac and the prophets could never have 
used or understood. The Greeks had come pouring 
in through the open gates; they sat down with Abra- 
ham and the prophets; and in the end the gospel was 
more a Greek gospel than a Hebrew. In the fourth 
century the stamp of Greek thought was indelibly fixed 
upon the formulas of Christian belief and interpreta- 
tion, and symbols like the Nicene Creed have come 
down the ages claiming an authority, and taking them- 
selves for granted as a final expression of Christian 
ideas, long, long after those same terms of Greek think- 
ing have ceased to be vital or even intelligible to the 



THE HOSPITALITY OF CHRISTIANITY 247 

most of men. We do not think in terms of "substance* 1 
today. We think in terms of process and growth. ' ,J 
say that Christ is of the substance of God does not 
signify much ; it does not convey a great deal of mean- 
ing. We may affirm anything to be true, but truth 
nowhere keeps its footing by affirming. It keeps its 
footing only by its ability to disclose itself as an evi- 
dent interpretation of reality. 

But I want to mention one further modifying influ- 
ence which came into Christianity from this Graeco- 
Roman world into which Paul so splendidly bore it. 
It began to take on through that influence the marks 
of catholicity. The primitive messianic Christianity 
could never have become a catholic faith. It was a 
little kingdom within a kingdom. It was native to 
Palestinian soil, and that soil would have been the 
arena of its history. But the moment men ceased to 
think or care about the visible reappearance of Christ, 
that moment the gospel began to become, in a sane and 
wholesome way, a kingdom of this world. It rooted 
itself in citizenship. It began to take the far view and 
to build for the days to come. It aligned itself with 
the progress, the meaning, and the scope of human 
history itself. It was no longer an apocalyptic king- 
dom to be waited for and yearned for while men aban- 
doned their earthly occupations, put away husbands 
and wives, ceased to engage in useful labor ; but it was 
the disclosure to men that their citizenship was in 
heaven, in the sense that the world, instead of being- 
left behind, would be served with a new sense of pro- 



248 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

portion and with a finer reverence for the world itself 
and all its occupations as ways of the spirit and foot- 
prints of God. 

As we follow this process of growth and inter- 
action of ideas and ideals, we discover that even that 
ancient term, "the kingdom of God," which could 
always fire devout Jewish hearts with zeal, gradually 
merges into those social and human ideals which give 
inspiration to the modern world. Guizot's remark that 
democracy crossed over into Europe in the little boat 
that bore the apostle Paul suggests an inexhaustible 
truth, for he bore the message, the impetus, the spirit 
which could readily combine with those tendencies 
which were already democratic rather than theocratic, 
which looked for the will of God to be done, not by 
his visible and external rule, but by its gradual entrance 
into the wills and the choices of men. 

But this backward look is already taking us too 
long. I want now, in the light of this backward look, 
to glance for a moment at our contemporary Christian- 
ity, and then for just a moment forward into the 
future. 

The contemporary question brings us face to face 
with our triumphant Anglo-Saxon civilization. Has 
this civilization surrendered to the primitive Christian 
ideals and conformed its life to those early messianic 
hopes? No, it has not done this any more than did 
Greece or Rome. It has worked a transformation of 
its own. It has brought to bear the inner character- 



THE HOSPITALITY OF CHRISTIANITY 249 

istics of the Anglo-Saxon race. It has sounded the 
note of its own inner life. Initiative, vigor of will, 
magnitude of achievement, emphasis upon liberties and 
rights, the conquest of the world, and the desire to 
rule with a strong arm — these are some of the obvious 
aptitudes of the race to which the most of us belong. 

Now, it is doubtless a difficult question to answer 
in an unprejudiced way — for it is impossible to dis- 
solve out the personal equation — but here is the ques- 
tion to be faced with what frankness and clearness of 
vision one may be able to bring to it : Is the will of 
God, the mind and purpose of the Eternal, working 
through Saxon enterprise, Saxon liberty, Saxon 
materialism if you will, even as it worked through the 
genius of the Hebrew, the Greek, and the Roman 
races? Is the charge that our age and civilization is 
a materialistic civilization, wide of the mark, in so far 
as it creates a divorce between the spiritual and the 
material? Is not the true charge rather that our 
materialism is not deep enough and fine enough unless 
it carry us through to the heart of it, to feel the pulse 
of the Spirit within it, and to make all these outward 
forms of our energy and enterprise plastic as the cla\ 
is plastic in the hands of the sculptor? 

We shall only be confused and misled if we listen 
to the voices which would divorce the spiritual life 
from all this splendid energy, this passion to create and 
control, which lies at the heart of our race ; the voices 
which would call us back to a religious life dominated 
by contemplation, by passive submission, by the spirit 



250 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

of resignation, by aimless waiting for the kingdom of 
God to come. 

It is the hour of man : new Purposes 

Broad-shouldered press against the world's slow gates. 

It is not only the energy and material accumula- 
tions of our age and race, but the vision of the divine 
spirit within it all, that Edward Markham has so finely 
caught in his poem of the "Mighty Hundred Years," 
where the very Powers of Water, Fire, and Air are 
described as crying out to man in very joy : 

Master us, O Man, for thou art fair; 

To serve thee is our freedom and our might. 

We love the craft that found our hidden place — 
The beauty of the cunning of thy hands; 

We love the quiet empire of thy face : 

Hook us with steel and harness us with bands ! 

Make us the genius of the crooked plow ; 

The Spirit in the whisper of the wheels ; 
The unseen presence sitting at the prow, 

To urge the wandering, huge, sea-cleaving keels. 

I have myself long since reached the point where T 
confess to a genuine admiration for the mighty sky- 
scrapers which go towering up to heaven like a hun- 
dred towers, of Babel. I sometimes stand and watch 
them grow with something of the feeling which I 
expect to have if some day I stand before the cathe- 
drals of Cologne, of Canterbury, and of York. But 
I never wish that they were cathedrals instead of the 
thing they are. Cologne and Canterbury belong to 



THE HOSPITALITY OF CHRISTIANITY 251 

the past. They are the product of an age which 
expressed its love and its aspiration and its service in 
the cathedral form. And I have no sympathy with 
those who exclaim : "Oh that our age were only serv- 
ing God like that!" What I want to be concerned 
about — what you, my fellow-men, need to be con- 
cerned about — is to see that in these lofty buildings, 
in the enterprise, the energy, the will which they repre- 
sent, you are to serve God as no other age has yet 
served him. Do these buildings stand for ruthless 
greed, for the over-riding spirit of competition, for 
the love of mammon? They may stand for that and 
nothing else. But they may also represent, as no 
cathedral ever did, the power to serve the eternal will 
— the ministry to one's fellow-men in ever-enlarging 
ways. They may represent truth, and justice, and 
generosity, and love to a degree which will make cru- 
sades, and monasteries, and cathedrals pale in impor- 
tance. 

Always there will be vision for the heart. 
The press of endless passion : every goal 

A traveller's tavern, whence he must depart 
On new divine adventures of the soul. 

As to the forward look into the future I have 
only a single comment ; and that shall be in the felici- 
tous words of President King, spoken the other day 
at the meeting of the American Board. In the midst 
of a most clear and dispassionate address upon the 
changed conceptions of the century in missionary 
theory and practice, President King raised the ques- 



252 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

tion as to what is today a really adequate motive. 
And this is his answer : 

That motive does not lie in the mere thought of hell, how- 
ever keen one's perception of the certainty of retribution; nor 
in the thought of the command of Christ regarded as external, 
however high the lordship ascribed to him ; nor yet in the thought 
of a prescribed task of witnessing, as a formal condition to be 
fulfilled for the coming of the Lord, however clear one's expecta- 
tion at this point may be. Equally certain is it that the motive 
does not lie in a supercilious attitude taken toward other peo- 
ples, and their values and ideals; nor in the denial of their pres- 
ent and later possible contribution to the understanding and inter- 
pretation of Christianity. We must recognize, and modern mis- 
sionary theory and practice are increasingly recognizing, that the 
other peoples must have their own opportunity for practical and 
theoretical interpretation of Christianity, and that they have their 
own large contribution to make to the world's understanding of 
its greatest faith. It is quite possible that the Indian or Japanese 
interpretation of Christianity may have as large a contribution 
as the American or the German. 

Those seem to me words of wisdom and of insight, 
although I can easily fancy a smile on the face of 
more than one self-sufficient, enterprising American 
on being told that a new motive for foreign mission- 
ary work is the need of having his own ideals modi- 
fied and enlarged by the people to whom he offers his 
faith. But is not that, after all, the motive which 
saves one's work from patronage and condescension? 
Is it not the only escape from a narrow and intolerant 
propaganism ? If the Graeco-Roman world modified 
the primitive Christian faith, and if in turn modern 
nations and peoples have modified the interpretations 
of the Graeco-Roman world, shall we regard it as 



THE HOSPITALITY OF CHRISTIANITY 25;, 

unreasonable that our own Christian faith shall once 
more be enlarged, illumined, reinterpreted by those 
who still shall enter the open gates on every side to 
sit down with Abraham and the prophets? 

It need only be said then, finally, that there is but 
one thing in all these changes and transformations 
which does not change, which cannot change — the 
heart of Christ, the spirit and the mind that were in 
him, the compassionate love, the human touch, the 
conviction that the will of God is the good-will, and 
that the good-will of God may be chosen and em- 
bodied in the life of man. That is the eternal gospel 
which persists through all time, through all races, 
through all history. The light of the morning is upon 
it, even as when the voice of Jesus first rang out 
among the Palestinian hills. The gospel is the good 
news of the presence and the love of God, of the 
unity and fellowship of men, of growth and progress 
into the life everlasting. 

It is not, O Jew, in hereditary privilege and elec- 
tion and descent from Abraham; "for of these stones 
God could raise up children to Abraham." 

It is not, O Greek, in your wisdom and philosophy , 
for that too may one day be forgotten. 

It is not, O Roman, in your laws and your world- 
wide administration ; for the Roman legions are long 
since scattered. 

It is not, O Saxon, in your strength, your power to 
put to use and service the dumb things of the earth. 



254 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

It is not, son of India, in your mysticism and your 
dreams. 

It is, indeed, all these in the outward and historic 
form; for "a religion for all the world must be made 
by all the world." But through the varying forms 
and transformations, in the furnace of history which 
fuses peoples and races together, there stands after 
all a form like unto the form of the Son of man. And 
whether we live in Palestine or Rome; whether our 
destiny and generation place us on the Ganges or the 
Mississippi ; whether we belong to the first century, 
the fourth, or the twentieth, we may, if we listen, 
hear a voice speaking as it spoke of old : "This is my 
beloved son; hear ye him." 



REJOICING IN YOUTH 



"Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth 
and let thy heart cheer thee in the days 
of thy youth, and walk in the ways of 
thine heart, and in the sight of thine 
eyes; but know thou that for all these 
things God will bring thee into judg- 
ment. Therefore remove sorrow from 
thy heart, and put away evil from thy 
flesh." — Ecclesiastes n:p, 10. 



XVI 
REJOICING IN YOUTH 

It would be worth much to us if we could have a 
photograph and a friendly sketch of the unknown man 
who wrote this brief tract of the Old Testament to 
which we so seldom turn. What kind of a man was 
he? How did he look? Was he the sort of a man 
young men would like? Were he on the faculty of a 
university, would his courses and his friendship be 
sought, because of something winsome and human, 
about him; or would he be avoided, when possible, 
because he was morose, cynical, and hard ? What, on 
the whole, did this man think of life? And what was 
he trying to say? What was his message? And is his 
message worth while? 

We must get along without the photograph. We 
must even get along without the friendly sketch — the 
memorabilia of this Old Testament Socrates. It is 
only as his face peers out through his message that we 
are able to decide whether he was a Socrates or an 
Epicurus, a Carlyle or an Omar Khayyam. 

He has been called most things that it is possible 
for a man to be called : croaker and pessimist, skeptic 
and profligate, Puritan and Cavalier, sage and preacher, 
man of the world, and writer of rubaiyats before the 
Persian Omar was born. Was he any of these things r 
Was he none of them ? Was he all in one ? 

I have already asked questions enough to make 
257 



258 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

this approach to the subject fall in with Dr. Van 
Dyke's remark about the spirit of the age, whose coat- 
of-arms is characterized by "an interrogation point 
rampant." I have certainly asked more questions than 
I can hope to answer. 

It may be sufficient for the present purpose, how- 
ever, to say, that, after renewed study of this ancient 
and enigmatical book, the conviction has grown deeper 
in my own mind that the writer, whoever he was and 
wherever he lived, was a genial, kindly, sympathetic 
soul, touched with a love of things human, feeling the 
value and the joy of human toil, of human friendships 
and associations — sad indeed, but chiefly because the 
horizons of life shut down all too suddenly and too 
soon ; saddened as one might have been before the days 
of Columbus, because the world, otherwise so good 
and inviting, was cramped and small. It is, on the 
whole, a book which, in the words of one of its wisest 
modern interpreters, "points out the fairest results that 
would come to men, if men were to obey the injunction, 
'Let this mind be in you which was also in Benjamin 
Franklin.' It moves in that matter-of-fact region 
which, because another state of being is not clearly in 
sight, will make the most of this." 

Perhaps this answers the question: Did this man 
love young men, and would young men have turned to 
him as one who understood them, and who understood 
the motives and impulses of their young-manhood 
life? I propose to let his own words still further 
answer this question. Yet these very words show us 



REJOICING IN YOUTH 

how difficult it is to place this unnamed sage where he 
belongs. There is something elusive about him at the 
best. For note his words:- "Rejoice, young man. 

in thy youth and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of 
thy young manhood, and walk in the ways of thy heart. 
and in the sight of thine eyes; but know that for all 
these things God will bring thee into judgment." 

Now, if you imagine this man a croaker to -tart 
with; if in your mind's eye you see a hard, unfeeling 
old critic, sitting up there and looking down upon you, 
pointing his long bony finger at you. this will be about 
what you will get from him: "Young man, have a 
good time if you want to. Follow the inclination of 
your heart. Do as you please. Let yourself go. But 
remember, the judge sits on high, and the judgment 
day is at hand. You can have your fling, but yon will 
pay the cost." 

But suppose you start with a different picture and 
a different presupposition. Here he is, this elusive 
man, and his face is peering for an instant through his 
words. He is a man of years, of wisdom, of full and 
ripe experience. There is something at once disarm 
ing in his friendly eye, and the lines of his face are 
pleasant lines. He might almost be what men used to 
call Walt Whitman — "the good gray poet." He is not 
even perched upon a pedestal, like some self-conscion> 
pillar-saint. He is down here upon the level, and he 
likes to be where young folks are. He is the kind of a 
man who can put his hand on your shoulder without 
your resenting his familiarity, and you recognize him 



260 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

as a comrade when he says to you : "Rejoice, O young 
man, in thy youth! For life is good, is it not? 'Tis 
good to be strong, to feel the zest of life, to enter into 
things with abandon and enthusiasm. 

How good is man's life, the mere living! How fit to employ 
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy. 

'Tis fine to feel that there are things to be done, obsta- 
cles to overcome, giants to thrash, foes to conquer, 
inside of us and outside of us. 'Tis good to feel the 
bounding pulse of life, and to know that life comes 
from the Great Source which pronounces it good, and 
which also passes the verdict of approval upon our own 
enjoyment of its zest, our own response to its eager 
and full appeal. Rejoice in thy youth! Walk in the 
ways of thy heart and in the sight of thine eyes ; and 
know that God will give thee, for so rejoicing and so 
walking, the judgment of the divine approval — that 
approval which has once for all declared that life is 
good and that the world is good; that it is almost as 
much a final duty to rejoice'as it is to obey; to be glad, 
as it is to be clean and true, to be high minded and 
holy." 

Now, if I were to order some portraits of the 
author of the book of Ecclesiastes, I should order them 
from this negative and not the other. I feel confident 
that this is more nearly the way that wise, genial old 
gentleman really looked. And if I were to write his 
memorabilia from the personal impressions which have 
fixed themselves here and there between the lines, this 



REJOICING IN YOUTH 261 

impressionistic sketch would forecast the lines of such 
a personal reminiscence. And it is in the hope that 
something of this personal smile and warmth and 
friendly presence may still linger with u^, as we go 
on, that I now venture to ask you to take his words 
away from the time, and the occasion, and the atmos- 
phere surrounding them, and to think of them as a 
general truth in relation to ourselves and to our time, 
and our manner of thought. 

Let me, then, continue what I have to say by brief, 
successive mention of three qualities which are funda- 
mental to life, and which are also essential qualities of 
youth. These three are Activity, Strength, and Ideal- 
ization. 

I need not enlarge upon a truth which is becoming 
a commonplace to us all, a fundamental principle in all 
recent observation of the manner in which life works, 
the relations of mind and body, the purpose and goal 
which are set before us in our smallest and our great- 
est tasks. This is all summed up in the single word 
"Activity." Your teachers in psychology may describe 
it as "the voluntaristic trend." It is one and the same 
thing. "The impulse to act is the deepest thing in us." 
says one of our contemporary wise men. "The world 
we will is the reality," says another. And before there 
was ever a wise man in the world to condense things 
into philosophic terms, there was a small boy some- 
where going around and accosting everybody, all the 
time with just one question : "What shall I do?" He, 



262 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

and all his colleagues, contemporaries, and successors 
from time immemorial, have been following the "vol- 
untaristic trend," though they knew it not by name. I 
heard a distinguished university president say the other 
day that when he was a small boy himself he used to 
think his father sat up nights thinking of things for 
him to do, and now that he had four boys of his own, 
whose activities he wished to steer, he knew he did. 
"What shall I do?" — that is the first question in our 
life to take definite and conscious shape. "What shall 
I do?" — it is the question which re-asks itself when- 
ever we get a new point of view, a clearer vision, a 
larger motive of life. It is the question we ask 
when we are born. It is the question we ask when 
we are born again. And it means that activity is indeed 
"the deepest thing in us," and that we are ever strug- 
gling, consciously or instinctively, to make the adjust- 
ment between our own organic life and the great world 
of ends and choices, of ideals and activities outside 
of us. 

But I have no wish to read you a lesson in psychol- 
ogy further than to lead up to this conclusion. When 
from our observation of human powers, our inspection 
of human experience, we find certain processes, 
methods, results, we may reasonably conclude that 
these processes and results have the sanction of the 
One who creates and controls the whole movement of 
life; that we are therefore to rejoice in it, to walk in 
the light of it, and to know that God has given it the 
verdict and judgment of his approval. 



REJOICING IN YOUTH 263 

Be glad, little boy, that there is something in you 
which keeps asking the question, "What shall I do?" 
and which keeps you restless because you never find 
enough to do. Keep asking the question. Don't stifle 
it. Don't let anyone else stifle it, for then you will 
grow old and dead. 

And rejoice, young man, in this signature of your 
youth. Be thankful that there is something in you, 
too, which keeps asking the child's question: "What 
shall I do?" Let us hold steadfastly to the belief that 
"the world we will" is indeed the real world, and that 
the things we do are the measure of our growth both 
in intellectual and moral stature. 

One of the most refreshing sights of our time is the 
spectacle of grown-up people learning a new meaning 
in the old words of Christ : "Except ye become as chil- 
dren ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven." They 
are learning that, instead of its being the chief duty of 
a grown-up person to give the benefit of adult experi- 
ence to young people, it is a part of his duty to perceive 
that young people have the same power to do in their 
own spheres what older people have in theirs; that the 
young person's life is not the mature person's life 
reduced and weakened, like a cup of hot water with 
"just a little tea" in it; but that the life of the child 
and the youth is the same life, the same activity — 
the life and the activity of the Eternal seeking expres- 
sion in terms that belong to each stage of growing 
life. What our teachers are beginning to grasp today 
as matters of scientific principle has been grasped by 



264 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

a few sympathetic, friendly folk through all time. I 
suspect that this dear old man, the author of the Book 
of Ecclesiastes, was one of this kind. Perhaps he had 
a boy of his own who asked: "What shall I do? v 
And as he touched the young life around him, and 
felt the essential soundness and sanity of that life in 
its eagerness, its enthusiasm, its almost restless move- 
ment, he said, more to himself than to anyone else: 
"It is good; rejoice in it; the judgment of divine 
approval is upon it, for God made it what it is. And 
oh ! it is so much better than the weary and senile years 
when men shall say: 'There is no pleasure in them.' ' 

It is only a step from activity to the quality which 
lies behind it and compels it — the quality of Strength. 
There is a zest, a vigor, a leap of the blood, which is 
recognizable as the strength and power of life. Youth, 
therefore, is primarily not so much a matter of years 
as it is of health, of mental vigor and hospitality, of 
eagerness and zest and appreciation of life; and from 
the most ancient times this essential quality of life 
has expressed itself in terms of strength. The aged 
apostle in his retirement appeals confidently to the 
young men around him. You remember his words: 
"I write unto you, young men, because you are strong 
and have overcome the evil one." There is always 
the certainty of response when appeal is made to 
strength, to courage and valor, to a chivalry which 
shall redress wrongs and a manhood which shall 
champion the weak. The Crusades would have Ian- 



REJOICING IN YOUTH 265 

guished without the support of youth. The armies of 
the world are reinforced from their ranks. For along 
with the love of adventure and excitement, and all the 
lesser motives which make young men follow the 
recruiting officer, there is somewhere always the spec- 
tacle of that splendid courage, that indomitable faith, 
which one may read upon the face of a Colonel Shaw, 
as St. Gaudens has immortalized him on Boston Com- 
mon. And when the times of peace come, then it is 
again the young men whose minds have not grown 
senile, and whose hearts have not despaired or grown 
cold, who wrestle with the political and social prob- 
lems of the hour. 

Every generation reaches a point where, in the 
consciousness of its own waning powers, it can sit 
down and do just what the aged apostle did : write 
unto young men because they are strong. Each gen- 
eration, perhaps, also reaches a moment of flitting 
melancholy over the subsidence of the fires which once 
burned with ardent flame. In such a mood as this, 
Phillips Brooks once exclaimed:* 

Who is not aware of that strange sense of loss which haunts 
the ripening man? With all that he has come to, there is some- 
thing that he has left behind. In some moods the loss seems to 
outweigh the gain. He knows it is not really so, but yet the mis- 
giving that freshness has been sacrificed to maturity, intenseness 
to completeness, enthusiasm to wisdom, makes the pathos of the 
life of every sensitive and growing man. 

Even a flitting regret like that, just the shadow of 
a momentary sorrow over the swiftness of the years 



266 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

is but one more confession that the essential sound- 
ness of youth lies in its strength, its physical force 
and endurance, its mental ardor and enterprise, its 
impetuous determination to bring things to pass. "The 
safe years, after all," a wise observer of life has 
remarked, "are the years of the enthusiasms and enter- 
prises; the dangerous years are the years when the 
vital powers are going the other way — when pleasures 
pall, when clouds return after the rain, when the 
blanch of disillusion is on everything." 

So we find our wise and tolerant observer of life, 
this ancient, unknown sage, bidding the young people 
around him believe in their youth, rejoice in their 
strength and their enthusiasm, and telling them that 
this ardor of life has the judgment of the divine 
approval. And then the invincible logic of his thought 
leads him in the very next sentence to write those 
memorable and familiar words : "Remember now thy 
Creator in the days of thy youth." I am sure we 
need not add that it is a call to remember God, not as 
someone outside one's life and one's strength, not 
something in addition to the other duties and privileges 
of life. It is rather a call to remember God who is 
invisibly, but really and vitally, present in the con- 
scious powers of life — in the strength, the glow of 
enthusiasm, the confidence of spirit, the endurance of 
powers, the very impetuousness of life, which make 
youth what it is. Remember thy Creator, not because 
he is so far away that you are in danger of forgetting 
he is there and need to be reminded, but because he 



REJOICING IN YOUTH 267 

is so near, so intimately a part of what you are and 
what you love, that you are likely to overlook the 
very nearness of his presence. Therefore, if your 
muscles are hard; if your lungs are full; if your 
digestion is sound; if your blood is ruddy and quick; 
if your entire physical reaction on life is normal and 
gives you the sense of tingling health, of perfectly free 
and spontaneous vigor, it is because the divine life is 
in all these things, meaning that you shall rejoice in 
them, that you shall see them as good, and shall direct 
them permanently into channels of health, of sound- 
ness, of sobriety and strength for yourselves and for 
those who may live through you. And if, again, you 
are conscious of strength of mind, if your brain is 
working like a steady and faithful machine it is once 
more a token that the divine Will means that you 
shall pronounce it good, and make it the loyal instru- 
ment for furthering truth, of making its bonds 
enlarge, and for yoking it to the service and the wel- 
fare of mankind. Rejoice in thy youth, in its strength 
and enthusiasm — and know that all these things God 
has already assessed and approved as messengers of 
the eternal purpose which moves through the world. 

I must hasten then to speak for just a moment of 
the third quality of youth — the quality of Idealiza- 
tion. It is quite impossible to dissociate this quality 
from the things we have already been considering. 
The eternal question, "What shall I do?" which 
springs up in childhood and which haunts the youth, 



268 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

and the enthusiastic strength to go about seeking an 
answer to this question, are closely linked with this 
other power which grows somewhere within us, a mo- 
tive and a vision great enough to sustain us. But I am 
sure there is a sense in which we recognize the time of 
youth as the flowering-time for the ideals of life. It 
is not because there are not still things to do, nor, even 
because men lose their strength and are too weak to 
do them, but because with so many a man the time 
comes when he thinks they are not worth doing — it is 
this which makes the pathos and the hopelessness of 
many a life. The prophet Joel, picturing the future, 
looked forward to a time when this power of idealiza-- 
tion should push clear through to the further limits of 
life, for he said: "Your old men shall dream dreams, 
and your young men shall see visions." But the 
thing of which one may be most sure and always sure 
at least,is that the young men see visions. The capa- 
city for the ideal is seldom absent from the hearts of 
youth. It is a dreadful thing to get blase at any time 
in life, but it is the most dreadful thing to get blase 
when all the hopes and visions and enthusiasms of life 
are beckoning on. 

What, then, is an ideal? The little child would 
say, perhaps : "It is the pleasant dream and anticipa- 
tion of life." Your middle-aged, disillusioned mis- 
anthrope would say: "It is the thing which has no 
actual existence. It is the lying mirage of the desert 
which you hoped would prove to be refreshing springs 
and cooling shade of palms." And every here and 



REJOICING IN YOUTH 269 

there you find also the man to whom the ideals of 
youth have faded away into the brutal opportunism 

of middle age — as some fair mountain scene projected 
on the canvas dissolves into the picture of hurrying, 
jostling crowds upon a city street. 

Is there then, we ask, no ideal which is neither 
childhood dream, nor manhood illusion and mirage? 
Let me answer the question by telling how a friend 
of mine put the matter the other day. "What is the 
difference," he asked, "between a car that is moving 
rapidly along the street, and the man who is running 
to catch the car?'' The primary difference is that the 
car is impelled by a casual force from outside. The 
man is impelled by a desire, a purpose, a motive power 
from within. The car goes because it must go. The 
man goes because he desires and wills to go. The 
thing which makes a machine a machine is the move- 
ment forced upon it from outside. The thing which 
makes a person a person is the movement which is'self- 
directed by the desires, the purposes, the goal which 
one places there himself. 

If this is a true description of personality, then the 
very power of personality is the possession of ideals. 
And on every side human life sinks to the level of 
mechanism when it ceases to establish and declare the 
ideals by which it lives. It is not so much the embodi- 
ment of the ideal and the actual attainment of the 
end, as it is the assertion of the ideal, the positing of 
the goal — "the will to believe," as Professor James 



270 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

puts it so forcefully; it is this which constitutes the 
power of idealization. 

What I aspired to be, 

And was not, comforts me : 

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. 

Let us repeat, then : A man's age is not primarily 
a question of years. It is a question of strength, and 
it is a question of ideals. A physician, speaking as an 
exponent of modern medical science, said the other 
day: "A man is only as old as his arteries are." In 
like manner, speaking from the point of view of 
those inner motives which control and gird the life, 
one may say as confidently: "A man is only as old as 
his ideals are." His age limit is determined, not by 
the encroachment of time, but by the waxing or wan- 
ing of his hopes, by the glowing or dimming of his 
vision, by the courage or the weariness which deter- 
mines whether he shall have and keep an inner goal. 
'The first great peril of middle life," someone has said, 
"is the degeneration of ideals." And the man who 
overcomes that peril has found the fountain which 
De Soto sought in vain. It is that draught of ever- 
lasting youth of which the prophet spoke when he 
said : "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew 
their strength; they shall mount up with wings as 
eagles ; they shall run and not be weary ; they shall 
walk and not faint." 

It remains, then, to say a single word in conclu- 
sion concerning a possible limitation in our ancient 



REJOICING IN YOUTH 271 

sage's point of view. He has made us realize the 
essential soundness of life. He has given us a clear 
vision of its dignity and worth. He has made us feel 
that life is to be received with joy, and pursued with 
enthusiasm and courageous zeal. He has led us to the 
conviction that the divine approval is upon his own 
work, and upon the zest and joy with which men 
undertake that work. 

What, then, did he lack? Wherein does his mes- 
sage fail to be a final message to ourselves? He 
lacked what the men of the Old World lacked before 
the keels of Columbus' caravels grazed the shore of 
the New — viz. : knowledge that the New World is 
here. He lacked what men lacked whose sky was a 
firmament and whose stars brightly studded that solid 
dome : he lacked the sense of the open sky, the myriad 
vastness of the world of stars, the sense of a universe 
fulfilling itself in an eternity of years. Had this lack 
and limitation been absent, it is more than likely that 
he would not have written his closing chapter with 
the melancholy description of the breaking-down of 
life. He might have written instead, in the spirit of 
Rabbi Ben Ezra : 

Grow old along with me ! 

The best is yet to be, 

The last of life for which the first was made ; 

Our times are in his hand 

Who saith : "A whole I planned, 

Youth shows but half ; trust God ; see all nor be afraid." 

And had he looked out on life from this higher 
table-land of vision, there are certain other notes of 



272 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

doubt and melancholy, and what here and there seem 
almost like notes of defiance, which would have gone 
out of his words; for he seemed at times like one 
bracing himself against the world, asking: "How 
can a man stand upon his feet and be a man with the 
vast pressure of the universe against him?" You feel 
an undertone like that which utters itself in the strong- 
words of a modern poet : 

I am the master of my fate, 
I am the captain of my soul! 

A fine, brave thing to say, if there is nothing finer or 
braver, no point of view which makes all this seem a 
prejudgment of the case, a measurement of the world 
before the map of life is actually drawn. 

If none of these limitations were discoverable in 
the counsel of this ancient wise man, it would have 
been because he had already drunk of that well of 
which Jesus said : "If a man shall drink of this water 
he shall never thirst." And was it not, indeed, at that 
well he needed to drink? Is it not precisely to this 
larger test that we must bring his words and bring 
our lives ? May we not be strengthened by his sturdy 
council, and yet feel that it needs the final word — the 
word which shall make the meaning of our human life 
seem less the maintenance of our integrity against the 
world, and more the entrance into all that the world 
is and all that life brings, with confidence, with aban- 
don, with sacrifice and love; and which shall also lift 
the sky above our heads, and set the stars celestial 
diameters apart, and give us space to breathe and 



RKJOICING IN YOUTH 273 

room to grow, and shall bring life and immortality 
to light? 

It was not the fault of the men of the fourteenth 
century that they did not know that the New World 
is here. Someone had to discover it first. It is inex- 
cusable that any dweller on the planet should be 
ignorant of that fact today. Neither was it the fault 
of this Hebrew sage that he could not say Amen to 
the message and the mind of Christ. The way of life 
had not been recharted and redrawn. But now it is 
projected upon the New World scale. "The law was 
given by Moses ; grace and truth came by Jesus 
Christ." The way to live with dignity and with 
courage was pointed out by the sages. The way to 
live in the larger sense of human comradeship living 
together, moving on together — this is the message of 
the One who spoke after the sages had ceased. To 
rejoice in one's youth, to put away sorrow from one's 
heart, to be sweet-tempered and brave, in the face of 
waning powers and of the grave from which there is 
no word of cheer — our ancient wise man has taught 
us this with a calm and beautiful austerity which we 
have tried to see. But to be of good cheer because the 
world has been overcome and death vanquished ; to 
feel one's self a part of the infinite meaning and value 
of life; to feel the mortal putting on immortality, 
claiming an eternity for itself, and living as seeing 
Him who is invisible because life means so much, and 
is worth such consecration, and such courage, and such 
faith — this is the achievement and the message and 



274 THE INVESTMENT OF TRUTH 

the everlasting gospel of the One to whom the proph- 
ets and the sages were clear but distant voices, crying 
in the wilderness: "The kingdom of heaven is ar. 
hand." 



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